Russia’s first ever charity social network launched earlier this month to enable handicapped children in Siberia’s Tomsk region to publish blogs and charities across the world to donate online for the kids’ treatment, the five-year-old regional Ordinary Miracle charity fund for children announced.
Elena Makarova, the fund’s president, said at a press conference at RIA Novosti, a Russian news agency, that the network will enable as many as 3,000 local kids and their parents to communicate with potential donors so that “each child may be able to find a friend and receive financial help.”
The new online resource also offers legal, medical and pedagogical information for parents.
The website has a special technical function designed to encourage children and their parents to actively blog. The more they do so, the higher the likelihood there is for a potential donor to come across their stories and pleas on the portal’s home page.
Donors have leeway in choosing whom they wish to help – in contrast to conventional charities that “one-sidedly hand pick up to ten kids to raise money for,” Makarova added.
Ordinary Miracle says it is a “swindler-proof website” which enables benefactors, fund managers, and parents to track donations all the way through to end recipients.
The idea for the project began last year in the wake of a success story involving a local one-year-old girl whose parents had gone online to eventually receive 40,000 Euros from a St. Petersburg benefactor for an expensive surgery abroad for the girl. The website is a helping hand to Ordinary Miracle that takes at least a year to raise a comparable amount – and only for five children at most, Makarova said.
