- The gifts are going to be offered during three special events to be organized between December 18-22 in Bucharest, Iasi and Constanta
Bucharest, December 18, 2017 – a total of 661 children from social care and foster centers in disadvantaged communities from the southern, northern and the eastern regions 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 three special events to be organized in Bucharest (on December 18) in Iaşi (on December 20) and in Constanţa (on December 22).
The first events of this year’s edition of the „Letters to Santa Claus” program took place in Timisoara and Cluj-Napoca for the children living in the western part of the country. In total, caravan volunteers will be offering gifts to 1,000 children across the country, with donations collected for the 2017 edition of the program reaching nearly 78,000 euros.
To let him know their wishes for Christmas, the little ones wrote letters to Santa, which were then collected by the caravan team, scanned and uploaded 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, employees from eight companies and non-governmental organizations have joined the Vodafone Romania Foundation. The donor-partners from Cohn and Jansen, Romanian Business Leaders, Marsh Broker Asigurare-Reasigurare, Next Advertising, OTP Bank, Republica.ro, Soprano Design SRL and Tuborg have prepared gifts for 318 children out of the total 1,000 children. The transportation of the gifts to the regional events in Timisoara, Cluj-Napoca, Iasi and Constanta is provided by FAN Courier.
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 new 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 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.
