The war in Ukraine has created a devastating humanitarian crisis, placing the lives of many children and adolescents affected by cancer at risk.
With the help of some private financial backers (including Reale Foundation and Lavazza), the Piedmont Region has coordinated a humanitarian operation that allowed patients aged between 2 and 21 years to be transferred to the Regina Margherita Hospital of Turin. Accompanied by family members, minors are now integrated into a treatment system that also includes the hospitality of three local organisations offering such a reception: Sermig, Casa Ugi, and CasaOz.
The project
Ukrainian families with minors fleeing the war and being treated at the Regina Margherita Children’s Hospital need hospitality night and day to pursue medical treatments and therapies.
In this sense, Project B Together for Ukraine responds to a set of needs:
- day and night reception and hospitality in an environment that can be called “home”;
- prevention of the risk of developing emotional difficulties, including serious ones, within the immediate family, especially by healthy brothers and sisters;
- support and assistance to cope with loneliness and family disorientation;
- assisting parents both in managing the disease and integrating locally if the family cannot return to their city of origin.
The families who are welcomed receive overnight hospitality in the residences of the three organisations; they are provided with complete and welcoming domestic environments and involved in their management and informal activities (coffee, shooting hoops, chatting on the sofa), as well as formal ones (meals together, workshops, trips, visits to the city).
Families are offered special initiatives and the specific support of a multi-professional team that offers personalised assistance. Healthy brothers and sisters of the hospitalised kids are followed by the educational team, while the parents take care of the sick child. Thanks to the mediation of the multi-professional team, and always with the support of the linguistic mediator, whole families or individual members can also be helped to process the traumatic experience seeking to identifying its limits to transform them into potential.
Other activities to support families will involve help in completing bureaucracy and hospital paperwork, help in transport and mobility, linguistic mediation and Italian language teaching, organisation of visits to the city and locally, inclusion of children in the home’s daily activities, and their enrolment at school with educational activities.
The beneficiaries
Whole Ukrainian families will benefit from the project: 14 hosted by Casa Ugi, 4 by Sermig, and 12-15 people by CasaOz. These numbers may increase if needed.
Indirectly, their presence in the facilities will be positive for the other guests and volunteers, in terms of cultural exchange.
Project name: B Together for Ukraine
Proposing organisations: Sermig, Casa Ugi, and CasaOz
Area of intervention: Health & Welfare