About Ecologia Youth Trust
In 1995 Ecologia Trust was registered as a Scottish charity. For
the previous eight years Liza Hollingshead, the founder and current
director, had been organising adult citizen diplomacy tours, youth
exchanges and students’ ecology education field work in
Russia.
Liza recalls:
“The impulse started in 1988 when I first visited Russia
with Danaan Parry, on a Citizen Diplomacy tour. Our first day
was a turning point in my life. We joined the May Day parade in
St Petersburg and were encouraged to chat to people as our purpose
was to make friends with Russians. What a great invitation! We
made friends with several students who were delighted to invite
us back to their dormitory. What an experience. The outcome for
me was a radical shift in my understanding of the basis of prejudice
– that we can’t help but believe the propaganda we
are fed if we have never actually met a person from the ‘other
side’. An idea was born – to create an event to bring
young people from three very different cultures together, in the
wilderness, and see what would happen. One year later 45 young
people travelled together for five weeks on a 10-ton truck through
the Kalahari and the Okavango Delta in Botswana – 15 Soviets,
15 Botswanans, and 15 Europeans. It was our first International
Youth Wilderness Exchange. The following year we all travelled
to Russia, to Lake Baikal in Siberia, via Sweden to Britain to
the Centre for Alternative Technology, Easterhouse in Glasgow
and finally Findhorn, where we worked with Trees for Life at Glen
Affric. We learned many, many things, the most significant of
which was that now we all had personal experience of each others’
cultures. Some people we liked, others we didn’t. But at
least we could say ‘I know Russians, Botswanans, Europeans
because I have lived with them, and I know their countries’.
Thus started a flurry of activity: exchanges with Russian teenagers,
students, and adults in Britain, at the Findhorn Community and
also in America. For seven years we ran Ecology camps for British
students who worked in the field with scientists from the Urals
Institute for Ecology in Ekaterinburg. These were the heady heydays
of perestroika, when all the rules disappeared and before the
new ones took hold. Everyone loved each other. It was a romp!
However, when the Market Economy came into being in 1990, things
settled down into a grimmer economic reality.
In 1993 I was introduced to Dmitry Morozov, the founder of Kitezh
Children’s Community. We clicked immediately. His aim was
an inspiration: to rescue orphaned children from impersonal, Dickensian
institutions, and to give them homes, families and education in
a supportive community.
I first visited Kitezh in Kaluga Region, 300 kilometers south
of Moscow in winter time! 20†C below freezing, deep snow, a howling
wind. 90 hectares of land, forest, a lake, land stretching forever,
begging to be used. One small house with a cluster of adults and
children living together, children taken from the streets of local
villages, adults drawn from all over Russia inspired by the vision
of one man. The only source of water was from the well outside,
and the toilet was outside too. How could people survive like
that? Their hearts opened and drew me in and I returned again,
and again. I took others with me, groups of adults and eighteen
teenagers from the Findhorn Youth Project. We brought the Kitezh
children to Findhorn in 1997. They felt at home and the connection
was made. In 1998 Dmitry Morozov was invited to speak at the Findhorn
Foundation Sustainable Communities Conference.
1998 was the year of the economic crisis in Russia when all the
banks folded, literally closed their doors. "Sorry no money
left, it’s lost." I was crazy with worry about the
children at Kitezh. So Ecologia Youth Trust came into its new
raison d’etre. Fundraising! That year we raised £20,000
for Kitezh. The following year we raised £30,000. The village
doubled in size as a result. Our ‘Adopt a God Child’
idea took off and people from all over the world ‘adopted’
Godchildren at Kitezh. We successfully applied for funding to
run a Social Work, Therapeutic Education and Community Building
Training at Kitezh. Play Therapy became part of the Kitezh way
of working with children’s healing process. We ran a Community
Building Workshop every year. The British National Lottery funded
a big project to expand the impact of the Kitezh model in Russia.
The second Kitezh village, Orion, is being built. DEFRA and the
British Council paid for a biological waste water treatment reedbeds
at both Kitezh and Orion. The work will not end – first
build Kitezh, then build more Children’s Villages all over
Russia based on the Kitezh model, until all Russian orphanages
are replaced by child-centred family communities.
And the children? Over ninety children have benefited from living
in Kitezh since it began. As the older children graduate, new
children arrive, rescued from orphanages and temporary shelters.
They are adopted by the Kitezh families, and embraced by the whole
community. Their teachers in the Kitezh school are also their
parents, and every aspect of Kitezh centres around them. To create
a ‘Developing Environment’ is the key to their philosophy
of education according to the founder, Dmitry Morozov, who says,
“The main idea of Kitezh is to create an oasis of love,
harmony and co-operation, to give orphan children the feeling
of belonging to a family, a community, to give them a good education
and to prepare them to go out into the world to become valuable,
effective citizens of new, democratic Russia. Kitezh school is
a harmonious holistic approach - a School of Life.” Four
of the first group of orphans have won places at University –
an exceptional achievement. The little street boys have grown
into strong young men with a light in their eyes. The new children
are reaping the rewards of the Play Therapy and other psychological
work and have begun to heal the scars of their terrible early
experiences. The teachers are experimenting with different forms
of education, addressing the needs of the whole child, and the
results are beginning to shine forth.
One child’s story: Sasha, 13 years old, joined a Kitezh
family. When was 8 his mother sold him for 10 roubles (about 20
pence) at a metro station in Moscow. The man who ‘bought’
him, took him to an orphanage where he lived for four years. The
rooms had either no light or no heat, so he lived in the corridor.
When he came to Kitezh, the boy had never seen a television, and
had huge gaps in his education. He is bright, he is clever, he
is interested in anything mechanical. He cried bitter tears in
every lesson because he couldn’t answer the questions put
to children 5 years younger than he. He walked alone along the
forest paths because he couldn’t make friends with the other
children. He had nothing to say, nothing to offer. So they gave
him a loving teacher with lessons on his own, his new father took
him to work with the bees, taught him how to chop wood, his mother
taught him how to bake pies. His eyes brightened when he saw me
because he knew how to say in English “Hello Liza! How are
you?” This child now has a home, loving parents, he is beginning
to be able to study at school with the other children, and to
make friends with his brothers and sisters. It will be a long
journey for Sasha, but now he has a future, and he will become
someone.
Kitezh is thriving! Over ninety children have already
benefited from living in Kitezh. Of those, some are married with
their own children, others have jobs, and some are studying at
college and university with a view to return to Kitezh to use
their own experience to help other children.
What can you do? How can you help? Please, become involved! We
welcome all suggestions. Fundraising events, car boot sales, tell
your friends about it, get schools and youth clubs involved in
fundraising. You can also volunteer to go and work at Kitezh,.
Or simply give a little money from time to time. The door is wide
open and we welcome it all.
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