VN/15.11.2024
Newsletter Christmas campaign 2024
Dear friends and supporters,
An eventful year is drawing to a close and Christmas is just around the corner. We are grateful that we were able to visit “our” children and young people in Lithuania in September 2024 and, thanks to your financial support, were able to do a lot of good again this year.
With this newsletter, we would like to ask you for a Christmas donation for our annual gift campaign for the 40 children and young people in Lithuania who take part in our programs. We would also like to introduce you to our new project “Basketball training for young men”, for which we would like to collect donations with this Christmas campaign and next year.
CHRISTMAS CAMPAIGN 2024
The Christmas campaign for our children and young adults in Lithuania has been an integral part of our activities for 27 years and always brings us and the recipients great joy. This year we have chosen the following gifts:
- For the teenagers and young adults in the PATRIA program: a practical, trendy drinking cup for on the go and a guidebook on how to get closer to your goal in small steps (this was a suggestion from PATRIA).
- For the children in Sonata’s house: we received an individual wish list from them with small wishes such as gloves, a soccer or a hairdryer that we would like to fulfill.
- For the hard-working caregivers: a voucher for cosmetic products in recognition of their valuable work
- For the PATRIA groups and Sonata’s family: financial support for the Christmas parties
We will make sure that all Christmas presents reach their recipients on time for Christmas. The presents will be bought locally by PATRIA and the foster mother Sonata. We will send our Christmas cards from Frankfurt to Lithuania. Our request now is as follows:
- Please sponsor a gift for your godchild or for a young adult in the PATRIA program and donate 30 euros.
- Please write a Christmas card to your sponsored child or to a young person in the PATRIA program ( “Dear friend in the PATRIA-program”…), gladly with photo, in English or German. The children and young people are always very happy to receive personal mail from their German sponsors or supporters.
- Support the Christmas parties, the gift campaign for the social workers or the “Basketball training for young men” project with a general donation of your choice (more information below).
Ingrid Debald has taken over the coordination of the Christmas campaign. Please let us know by November 30, 2024 whether you would like to support our 2024 Christmas campaign.
Ingrid Debald can be contacted at ingrid.debald@web.de or Tel: 069/74309064.
Please send the personal Christmas letter for the sponsored child or young person in the PATRIA program to Ingrid Debald, Lerchesbergring 107, 60598 Frankfurt/Main) by 1 December 2024 at the latest so that we can send the letters to Lithuania by post in good time
Our account details are:
Kinderdörfer in Litauen e.V.
Frankfurter Sparkasse 1822
IBAN DE14 5005 0201 1200 072 152
BIC HELADEF 1822
We would be VERY pleased to receive broad support for our fundraising campaign for our 2024 Christmas campaign.
BASKETBALL TRAINING FOR YOUNG MEN (FROM 2025)
An important piece of information in advance: Basketball is the number one national sport in Lithuania, far ahead of soccer. This is why basketball is so important and popular in Lithuania, even among young people. PATRIA’s new social worker, Laisvydas Gudaitis, has proposed setting up a basketball team in Kaunas, which would consist largely of young people who live or have lived in residential care. Laisvydas has already led such a project with socially disadvantaged young people (the photos in this newsletter are also from this project). He is an excellent basketball coach and very motivated. At this year’s PATRIA camp, Laisvydas often played basketball with the young people and we could see how much fun they had.
We need € 6,000 for this project next year. This will finance the hall rental for weekly training, sportswear and shoes for the participants, travel costs to the matches and the fees for participation in the regular league.
We as the Board of Management team are convinced that this project makes a valuable contribution to strengthening the self-confidence and team-building of young people and would be delighted if you would support this project with a donation.
We thank you for your trust in our work and wish you a wonderful pre-Christmas period.
With warm regards
Your team from “Kinder- und Jugendförderung in Litauen e.V.”.
Otmar Debald, Jurate Bogacz, Ingrid Debald, Christine Scheidt, Verena Nacke, Simone Graubner-Müller, Susanne Welsch-Lehmann and Frank Welsch-Lehmann