"Our Kids" - Arche Frankfurt and a children's home in the Ukraine:
cds Wohnbau is supporting the “Our Kids” project this year. Projects in Frankfurt and the Ukraine are to be supported with the “F.A.Z.-Leser helfen” campaign. Last but not least, “Our Kids” in Kyiv and the Arche in the north-west city are about basic needs.
Frankfurt:
Daniel Schröder, manager of the Arche Frankfurt, and Julia Hildebrandt, facility manager of the Arche Frankfurt-Nordweststadt, report that it is not necessarily a matter of course that a young person in the north-west city has a roof over his head or knows where he is sleeping. "For some who come to us, it's about basic care," says Hildebrandt. She tells of the 17-year-old, whom she met to give her food every day during the week that the Ark was closed in the summer. And she tells of children who get up alone in the morning and for whom she is the first conversation partner of the day. The Arche Nordweststadt takes care of the children that hardly anyone else takes care of. Many children come from households in which the parents are Hartz IV recipients, ninety percent of the children have a migration background, the parents often come from Morocco, Turkey, and increasingly also from Syria and Afghanistan. "The children who come here are basically on their own," says Schröder. In the ark they found the “triad” that their parents usually offer: food, help with homework, games.
Kyiv:
Some are orphaned, others only saw their parents drunk, violent or on drugs. For many here, being a child meant fighting for survival. Anyone who has arrived at “Our Kids” has already been at the bottom. But you can't see that from above, from the tenth, eleventh, twelfth floor of the neighboring houses. Neither is the poor condition in which the buildings are located. Since opening in 2007, there has been no money left over to renovate the houses. The project, which has its administrative headquarters in Frankfurt, was founded as an initiative of the German-Polish-Ukrainian Society and is financed entirely by donations to this day.
The outer walls are leaking in many places, and technical devices in the apartments no longer work. In Ukraine, her work for Kiev's street children, who officially don't even exist, is considered a "flagship project". Yuri Pavlenko, Member of the Ukrainian Parliament, hopes that the concept of "Our Kids" will also serve as a model for state institutions. But the close-meshed and family-based care of the children can hardly be afforded by the state. In any case, children's rights are way down on the political agenda, he regrets. Ukraine had been busy with other things in recent years. For example, with the consequences of the war that has been raging between pro-Russian separatists and the Ukrainian military since 2014. The fights have an impact on the work of "Our Kids". The home has been taking in children from the war zone for three years – most recently five siblings from the war-torn city of Mariupol.
