- The gifts are going to be offered during two special events to be organized in Timisoara and Cluj-Napoca
Bucharest, December 12, 2017 – a total of 339 children from social care and foster centers in disadvantaged communities from the western part of the country will receive the Christmas gifts they wished for, with the help of the volunteers of the „Letters for Santa Claus” caravan, the largest volunteer program of the Vodafone Romania Foundation. The gifts will be offered to children at two special events, the first event to be held in Timisoara (on December 13) and the second one, in Cluj-Napoca (on December 15).
Timişoara and Cluj-Napoca are the first of the five cities where such events are organized for the children who will receive Christmas gifts, during the 2017 edition of the program, Timişoara being also included for the first time in the program. The following events will take place between 18 and 22 December, in Bucharest, Iasi and Constanta. In total, caravan volunteers will bring gifts to 1,000 children from around the country, with donations collected for this edition reaching nearly 78,000 euros.
To let him know their wishes for Christmas, the little ones wrote letters to Santa, which were then collected, scanned and uploaded by the caravan team via an application specifically developed for this program, so the letters could be read by volunteers. The „Letters for Santa Claus” caravan has traveled nearly 4,000 km in the span of two weeks, to gather the wish-letters from all of the 1,000 children from Bucharest and from 16 counties of the country – Alba, Argeş, Bacău, Bihor, Botoşani, Buzău , Cluj, Constanta, Gorj, Iasi, Ilfov, Prahova, Suceava, Timis, Tulcea and Vrancea. By the end of the 2017 edition of the program, the caravan will have traveled 12,000 km in total this year.
For this year’s edition of the program, employees from eight companies and non-governmental organizations have joined the Vodafone Romania Foundation as partner donors and prepared gifts for 318 children out of the total 1000.
At its eighth edition in 2017, the „Letters for Santa Claus” national program has grown from year to year, thanks to partnerships engaged with more than 100 non-governmental organizations across the country so far, thus reaching more and more deprived communities. This year, the Vodafone Romania Foundation has managed to add eight more communities on the caravan map, with the number of children to receive gifts from Santa increasing by 400 vs 2016.
From 2010, the year of its launch, the „Letters for Santa Claus” caravan has reached 3,100 children from underprivileged communities across the country. The total amount of donations made during all these years by volunteers for the purchase of the gifts for the little children stands at almost 200,000 euros.
The Vodafone Romania Foundation is a Romanian nongovernmental charitable organization, set up in 1998, which operates separately and independently from the Vodafone Romania SA’s business. During its 19 years of activity, Vodafone Romania Foundation has funded 1,046 programs run by 660 NGOs throughout the country, in the fields of healthcare, education and social services. These projects had a total of 2 million beneficiaries – children, young and old people and physically, socially or economically disadvantaged people. So far, Vodafone Romania has invested over 26 million euros in projects run by nonprofit partner organizations. More details about the Foundation’s programs are available at fundatia-vodafone.ro, http://jurnaldebine.fundatia-vodafone.ro/ and www.facebook.com/fundatiavodafone.
