The dreams come true! More than 1 000 HIV-positive children will receive the presents they dreamt about by the New Year and Christmas!
19 december 2012
The dreams come true! More than 1 000 HIV-positive children will receive the presents they dreamt about by the New Year and Christmas!

Today on Saint Nikolas Day the Elena Pinchuk ANTIAIDS Foundation announced the first results of the “Dreams come true!” project – during the first 19 days of winter the foundation collected the New Year and Christmas presents for more than 1 000 HIV-positive children from all the regions of Ukraine. Thousands of Ukrainians who decided to try the role of Santa Claus gave the gifts or made the donations for fulfilling the children New Year’s wishes and Christmas hopes gathered at a special web site mrii.in.ua.

Today, about 200 gifts are already presented to the little dreamers. Ahead is the hard work of dozens of social workers, who will take care that every donation, every gift would arrive quickly to their new owners. But the goal of this project - to engage in charity as many people as possible, to unite them for a good cause - has been already achieved.

During 19 days at about 60 thousand unique visitors visited the web the site mrii.in.ua and looked through more than a half of a million web pages. The majority of the donors are young advanced inhabitants of the big cities. This is confirmed not only by the geography of visitors - Kiev, Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk, Donetsk, Odessa, Zaporozhye, Lvov – but by the fact that nearly 20 percent of visits to the site were made via mobile devices.

For those who did not have time to take part in the project, there is still a chance - the information at the project website continues to be updated and the list of the children's wishes can be replenished.

For obvious reasons, there are no photos of children or their direct contacts on the web site - only a name, age, location and brief information about life of a little person. Each "wizard" can choose the closest region in which the child lives, the gift category, and the sum of donation. A gift can be paid by credit card or you may print a receipt for payment through the bank. Also, if you have roller skates or a cell phone that someone dreams about, you can simply pass them to a little dreamer.

The project will face further development at the beginning of 2013 – the opportunity to donate your own things for HIV-positive children and make a targeted charitable donation for specific children in need will appear at the web site mrii.in.ua.

Elena Pinchuk, founder of the ANTIAIDS Foundation says: "All children dream, especially before the New Year and Christmas! But HIV-positive children dream in a special way… Touching, plaintive lines of their letters engender a sense of a huge gap between the world of childhood and the real life of HIV-positive children where their parents barely have enough energy and resources for the most basic things. We are constantly helping such families by purchasing medicines and baby food, paying for expensive tests and summer vacation. But making the dreams of these kids come true, we're doing something much more important - we return them a piece of childhood".

The Elena Pinchuk ANTIAIDS Foundation offers the Ukrainians an opportunity to be involved in charity and to fulfill dreams of HIV-positive children already for the second year in a raw. In 2011 the New Year wishes of 810 HIV-positive children were published at the mrii.in.ua site, most of them were preschoolers. Around 30,000 USD were collected for them. Those were private donations. The project was supported not only by the thousands of ordinary people, but also by partners of the foundation. Among them - the Credit Dnepr bank and the Coca-Cola company, which took part in the financing the project. Their transferred funds helped to realize the dreams of dozens of children. The ICTV channel presented kids with 3 mobile phones. The Kyivstar company provided modems and additional recharge cards for 66 children who had received computers or laptops as gifts.

The biggest number of wishes was fulfilled in the form of gifts, which were directly transferred to the children through their parents or social workers. But not all kids dreamed about material things. Many wishes were just fabulous and almost unrealistic - especially children from the provinces, from small towns were unique. And the fairy tale has become true! There was a meeting with the Borisenko brothers in the dolphinarium. A young beauty got a designer dress from Aleksey Zalevsky, the "New Channel" donated a guitar autographed by the “Stars Factory" participants to a child from Melitopol, and Vlad Yama met and talked with his six year old fan. A happy football fan got an autograph of Andrey Shevchenko, and the players of one of the hockey teams sent to their young fan (besides autographs) a uniform, scarves and other team paraphernalia.

There were more than 70,000 unique visitors in 2011 at the project site, up to 8 000 people attended the site during a few days. Some of them have become real record-holders, having made more than 50 visits in December 2011.

Our media partners and "media-volunteers" did a lot for the success of this project. The Milk creative agency, Pronto Film Production Company, Cinnamon postproduction studio and composer Eugene Bednenko worked pro-bono to create a video and radio PSA about this project. In 2012, as well as a year ago, this social spot was launched in the rotation of the national TV channels ICTV, STB, QTV, New Channel and M1, radio station Melody, Russian Radio Ukraine, KISS FM and Hit FM radio stations.

Join the groups of the Elena Pinchuk ANTIAIDS Foundation in social networks FashionAid и SafeConnection.

For detailed information, please, contact Pavel Piminov, Communications Director, Elena Pinchuk ANTIAIDS Foundation: +380 67 466 8736, [email protected].

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