On New Year’s Eve, the Baikal Mining Company provided assistance to large families living in an alternative children’s center — a «children’s village» in the town of Shilka, Trans-Baikal Territory. The company covered the costs of housing and communal services. Today there are two foster families living there with 15 children, 11 of them are foster ones.
Each family lives in a two-story house with a total area of over 400 square meters. The house has living rooms, a kitchen-dining room, utility rooms, a dressing room, bathrooms and a gym.
“The Children’s Village is a socially significant project that helps children left without parental care to find their families. Today it is the only form of life arrangement for children in the region, which is an alternative to children’s centers and allows realizing the basic right of a child to live and be raised in a family. State institutions, with all their developed infrastructure, cannot compensate a child for a family, and a teacher, no matter how good a specialist they are, cannot replace a parent. Being brought up in a family is fundamental in the development of a child’s personality, ” noted Evgeny Kazachenko, Minister of Labor and Social Protection of the Population of Transbaikalia. According to Yulia Shabala, Deputy Director for Sustainable Development and Corporate Issues of BGK, the company will support the “children’s village” in the future. She also noted that the experience of life arrangement of children left without parental care, in the form of a “children’s village”, jointly with the Ministry of Social Protection of the region, is planned to be extended to the territory of the Kalarsky region. The press service of the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection of the population of the Trans-Baikal Territory has claimed that there is also a need to support large families in the region.
Translated by Ilya Mikhin
