A new social campaign to help children and people in need was born in Bucharest. “Zi de Bine” Association has launched the eponymous project aiming to build communities to help thousands of people in vulnerable situations and to raise awareness over some ignored social causes. The association will endorse 12 NGOs with 12 such causes, one every month.
Each cause selected by the association is addressing a specific community and is carried out within maximum 30 days, is financed by a person who is celebrating his/her birthday that month and is implemented with the help of a local NGO.
The social causes can be financially endorsed by SMS, you can send the message “SUS” at 8862, for EUR 4, or through individual donations, partnerships with the companies that want to encourage their employees to get involved in social causes.
“Zi de Bine” Association aims at reaching 300,000 donors, while as many people as possible can become generous supporters of one of those 12 causes through donating their anniversaries.
Among the causes to be supported there are children admitted in hospitals, institutionalized children, adults with mental issues, people in mourning, as well as cases related to education, poverty, domestic violence, etc.
The mechanism is simple: every cause will be announced at the beginning of each month, when the need and beneficiaries will be also revealed. At the end of the month, donors will be able to see the results of their involvement.
“Zi de Bine” is a huge challenge, for we’ll have to deliver what we’ve promised at the end of each month. We chose causes that are hardly raising any money, for instance children abandoned in hospitals, causes related to mental illnesses, mourning, poverty, etc, which are important but seldom ignored causes. We would like now to bring these causes into the limelight, to make people in need feel important, to show that they do matter. It’s hard to estimate now how many beneficiaries we’ll have, anyway this year we plan to reach at least 3,000 people. So, we need the endorsement of every birthday person who is looking for his/her meaning, we need the help of every person who has no time, but wants to get involved. Companies are invited as well to open the champagne in the month when they are celebrating their establishment,” said Melania Medeleanu, the manager of the “ZI de Bine” Association in the press conference announcing the campaign, hosted today at “Marie Curie” Hospital for Children.
Support for the little ones abandoned in hospitals
The first cause where you invited to donate is targeting children abandoned in hospitals and is carried out by Blondie Association, which provides a community care for the children with various affections who are abandoned by families in hospitals or who have no safe environment for the treatment at home.
The Blondie House is a transit centre, a temporary location outside Bucharest, which can host up to 4 children with various medical problems and who need special care and treatment after hospitalization. The main beneficiaries will be children abandoned by their parents in hospital, for whom there is the Child Protection’s consent or the parents’ consent.
The project is worth EUR 50,000 and the fund raising campaign will unfold from March 1 to March 31.
The famous neonatologist doctor Catalin Cirstoveanu has joined the campaign, calling donors to endorse children in need and their families, indirectly.
The doctor recounted he had many cases when he and other colleagues managed to save the lives of babies, to stabilize them, but these babies died once they were back home because the parents did not know to take care of them or to cope with the responsibilities of handling a serious medical case.
“We have so many cases of this kind, I don’t even remember the exact number. Babies who left the hospital in a stable condition, but who died at home because their families did not know how to protect them from getting other infections. I remember the case of a baby who underwent a heart surgery in Germany and came back to Romania inside his family that was not prepared to take care of him and who died of a respiratory infection. There was a similar case in Caracal, with a baby we saved and who died at home after two months due to a mere respiratory infection. These children with serious diseases need precise post-hospitalization treatment, need a proper diet, need to be separated from the rest of the children, need certain vaccines that families cannot afford. Of course, we also have parents who are models, who are taking care of children with serious diseases, who know how to put sub-dermal electrodes, for example, but the truth is most of parents are not prepared. And, so we came up with the idea of this campaign. We did not invent that, it is a familiar concept abroad, care after care, especially for families who need help in this respect”, doctor Cirstoveanu said.
In her turn, the manager of Blondie Association, Adelina Tonceanu revealed a sad reality.
“In the intensive care unit, one child in five is not visited by the parents at all or hardly ever. Although they go through complicated surgeries and their cure comes up with huge efforts, once they leave the hospital and go home the lack of care of their unprepared families makes the condition of the children get worse and, many times, leads to death.”
Adelina announced the Blondie House is scheduled for opening on March 31 with the help of donations. The community care centre is able to host 4 children the most and there will be one nurse, one medical orderly and one caretaker taking care of two children, with three shifts needed to cover the entire 24-hour day.
In an attempt to continue the well-known MagiCAMP and MagicHOME campaign, which impressed hundreds of thousand of people with the cases of parents of sick children who are forced to “live” in a chair by their hospital beds, the current “Zi de Bine” campaign plans to raise awareness over a more heartbreaking reality: there is no one “living” by the hospital beds of these abandoned children.
So, the campaign will also have a symbolic moment on March 14, at 14:00hrs when people are invited to sit on an empty chair on a 5.7km distance from the “Marie Curie” Hospital to Blondie House in Popesti Leordeni. 2,300 volunteers are therefore expected to join this symbolic event, to sit on 2,300 empty chairs for an hour. Those 2,300 chairs will link the Marie Curie hospital to the Blondie House at every two metres, with volunteers symbolically accompanying abandoned children to their new temporary home.