Bucharest, November 7, 2017 – The „Letters for Santa Claus” caravan, run by the Vodafone Romania Foundation has reached 1,000 children from foster care centers in 26 disadvantaged communities across the country this year. The children have written letters to Santa, telling him about the gifts they would like to receive this Christmas. To collect all the 1,000 letters, the caravan team traveled almost 4,000 km in two weeks, passing through Bucharest and 16 counties – Buzau, Arges, Ilfov, Cluj, Bihor, Alba, Constanta, Vrancea, Bacau, Iasi, Botosani, Suceava, Timis, Gorj, Tulcea and Prahova. The largest number of letters was collected from Constanta, Iasi and Cluj.
„I’d like Santa to bring me a flute, because I love to sing”, writes a little girl in her message to Santa Claus. „I do rhythmic gymnastics and I need a red costume,” tells another girl in her letter to Santa.
Now at its eighth edition, the „Letters for Santa Claus” national program has expanded each year through partnerships with non-governmental organizations across the country, covering more and more disadvantage communities. This fall, the Vodafone Romania Foundation has managed to add eight more communities on the caravan map, with the number of children who have written letters to Santa increasing by 400 compared to last year.
The letters collected by the foundation will be scanned and loaded into an application specially developed for this program, in order to be read by the program volunteers. Starting 2010, the year of its launch, the „Letters for Santa Claus” caravan has managed to collect letters from 3,100 children from disadvantaged areas around the country.
Vodafone Romania Foundation is a Romanian nongovernmental organization with charitable status, distinct and independent of the company’s commercial operations, established in 1998. During the 19 years of activity, Vodafone Romania Foundation has financed 1,046 programs run by 660 NGOs throughout the country, in the fields of health, education, social services. The projects had 1.9 million beneficiaries – children, young and old people, physically, socially or economically disadvantaged persons. So far, Vodafone Romania has invested more than 26 million euros in projects run by nonprofit partner organizations. More details about the Foundation’s programs are available on fundatia-vodafone.ro, http://jurnaldebine.fundatia-vodafone.ro/ and www.facebook.com/fundatiavodafone.
