Speech in the European Parliament and the "Do you hear?" campaign: Voices of Children report for April-June

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Voices of Children Charitable Foundation continues to help families with children in Ukraine, providing them with humanitarian, psychological, rehabilitation and advocacy support.

As of June 2023, the organization has:

180 professionals in the team, including 116 psychologists and leisure specialists;
14 locations in Kyiv, Lviv, Truskavets, Chernivtsi, Ivano-Frankivsk, Berehove, Kryvyi Rih, Kharkiv, Vysoky, Ternopil, Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia, Chernihiv and Mykolaiv, where our psychologists are constantly working;
mobile team of psychological assistance in the Kyiv region;
almost 12 thousand children and parents to whom the Foundation provided help and support.

In total, we spent 35,232,000 hryvnias on all programs during the three months.

During this time, the team of the Voices of Children Foundation conducted 1,194 individual and 505 group psychological sessions with children, as well as 619 psychosocial support sessions (art therapy, fairy tale therapy, rhythm therapy, movie clubs, quests, etc.). Our team organized two visits of families with children who suffered from traumatic events due to the war, under our author program of recovery and self-help for families "Camp+".

On the basis of our seven branches, the team of Voices of Children organized training sessions with teachers and school psychologists on working with children in wartime conditions. Thus, 24 meetings were held with 215 school employees.

In April, representatives of Voices of Children Charitable Foundation spoke at a meeting of the European Parliament's Committee on Culture, where they spoke about the deportation of Ukrainian children and other war crimes committed by the Russian occupiers.

In May, the Ukrainian Embassy in Vienna held an event on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Institute for Human Rights in Ukraine. It was attended by ombudsmen of 16 countries, as well as co-founders of the Voices of Children Foundation - Olena Rozvadovska and Azad Safarov. They told the diplomats the real stories of children affected by the war and read a letter from a boy from the occupation.

On World Children's Day, June 1, the Voices of Children Charitable Foundation launched the "Do You Hear?" campaign. The campaign is aimed at encouraging parents to listen and hear their children when they talk about the war, as it makes it easier for them to go through the difficult experience. The day before, we collected letters from children about their lives during the war. The "Do You Hear?" campaign was supported by human rights activists, journalists, and foreign influencers. They read out the children's letters on video and published them on their social networks.

As part of the "Do You Hear?" campaign, the Voices of Children Charitable Foundation and Ukrzaliznytsia opened an exhibition titled "War through the Voices of Children" at the Southern Railway Station in Kyiv. It featured illustrations by famous artists who visualized children's quotes about life during the war. Children's stories could be heard using QR codes.

Ukrainian media agency Ukrayinska Pravda wrote about the campaign and published several letters from children. Also, Olena Rozvadovska, co-founder of the Voices of Children Charitable Foundation, read a letter from 10-year-old Alina from Skadovsk live on the United News telethon.

In total, the coverage of the "Do you hear?" campaign reached about 100 thousand people.

On June 23, an informal reception for journalists from Albania, Japan, Serbia, Belgium, Lebanon, Algeria, Kazakhstan and Iraq was held at the Kyiv office of the Voices of Children Charitable Foundation. As part of this event, organized by EEAS and Lviv Media Forum, journalists talked to Olena Rozvadovska, the Head of the Board of our Foundation, Dmytro Lubinets, the Ombudsman of Ukraine, Myroslava Kozlova, a lawyer at Save Ukraine, and Kateryna Rashevska, an expert at the Regional Center for Human Rights, about violations of the rights of Ukrainian children by Russia. The main topics included the deportation of Ukrainian children by Russia, their identification, repatriation to Ukraine, forced passportization and violations of humanitarian law in relation to prisoners of war. Olena Rozvadovska emphasized the importance of psychosocial rehabilitation of those children who were returned to Ukraine.