The new Charity Raffle cooked by @ogbook_club! Besides the cool prizes, this raffle is special, it supports my initiative for helping Ukrainian refugee children. I kindly ask you to support the project by participating in the raffle. Below is the description of the project 👇 As you may know, my family and I are refugees from Ukraine and now we are living in Albania in the town of Vlore. We moved here from Bulgaria in July 2023. In Vlore, besides us, there are several dozen families from Ukraine, most of them are mothers with children. In Bulgaria (which is a member of the EU), there were support and development centers for Ukrainian children funded by the government - classes where our children could study several times a week. There were classes in drawing, arts and crafts, dance, general development, and even a child psychologist. Here in Albania (non-EU member) there is nothing like that. Our daughter was suffering from a lack of communication with Ukrainian children, and other parents said the same about their children. My wife and I have decided to organize free classes for Ukrainian children in Vlore and volunteered to be the teachers there. It is a kind of child development and education club, where children can connect with other Ukrainian children and feel a part of the home they have temporarily lost. We appealed to the local authorities for help, asking them to give us a place for a few hours a week, but they ignored us for a long time and then refused us altogether. Then I was lucky enough to meet the director of a local NGO (mkpn_org). They have a big room that they were willing to give us twice a week for our classes. So, at the end of October 2023 we started holding our classes. Unfortunately, this NGO can’t help us with funding, supplies, equipment and materials for our classes, but only allows us to use their space. We don’t want to take money from the parents, because Ukrainians have little money and no possibility to work here. That’s why our children’s classes are free of charge. So far, as of the end of March, we have held 32 classes and we keep running them twice a week. We run our classes without any financial support, buying materials and supplies ourselves and asking the parents for help. We try to make our classes interesting at the lowest possible cost. It’s not an easy task because all the families are refugees, including my own. Most of the families have lost their belongings and income after fleeing and are not able to recover it yet. I’d like to reduce the costs for the parents as much as I can and make our classes more interesting at the same time. I would like to add more activities and educational things for the children, but I and the parents can’t allocate more money for that. For example, I’d like to buy Ukrainian textbooks and children’s books to make a small library for the kids to share. I’d also like to organize a couple excursions for the kids. One to the zoo which is in the neighboring city and another could be a short trip to the mountain river, sheep farm, olive plantation and so on. The Charity Raffle we are running now could fund these classes for several months to come. I also hope to improve the quality of the classes by getting more and better supplies and organizing more activities for the kids. It's a simple and honest project with a quick impact. Learn more about the raffle here: medium.com/@BenBrunschot/a05… Get your tickets to participate in the raffle here: buynfts.exchange/sales/og5/ Also, you can support us by reposting this post. @book_io #CardanoCommunity