Click here to see a film of our volunteers at work and to meet some of the children we help.
Click here to see what you can do to help.
Click here see one of our volunteers describe her personal experience on CBS News.
Chernobyl Children's Project International works in partnership with families and communities to support their recovery from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986.
Our largely volunteer organization works in partnership with the people of Belarus and Ukraine to form professional peer relationships and to help them overcome the domino effect of poverty, poor health, and social issues that continue to plague so many, even more than 20 years after the accident.
You can support any of these programs by clicking the green DONATE NOW button on the upper right hand side of your screen.
Take a poll at the end of the page to let us know which of these programs you think is the most important one.
We seek donations and sponsorships for the following programs:
Lifesaving children's heart operations: Your donations have saved the lives of hundreds of
children suffering from a marked increase in cardiac birth defects since the Chernobyl disaster. American surgical teams travel to Belarus and Ukraine to save lives and train local physicians. In Belarus, our intervention has reduce the waiting list for life saving surgery from 7000 to 2400, and we need now only help with the most complicated surgeries. Ukraine, however, continues to face enormous challenges in meeting the needs of the 6000 children who are born in that country every year with genetic cardiac disease. We've been bringing volunteer surgical teams in to Ukraine since May 2008. We hope to raise enough funds to bring the volunteer teams to Belarus twice, and to Ukraine 6 times, in 2010. Would you like to sponsor a child or a mission? Contact us.
- Recuperation camps and programs for the most needy children: Over 17,000 children from contaminated regions have spent winter and summer holidays with families in Ireland. CCPI hosts many other fun learning and recreational programs in their home country of Belarus . . including programs for children recovering from heart surgery and cancer, and seriously disabled children on theirs first trips away from orphanages. And every year, we collect funds to bring up to 30 terminally ill children to Ireland to spend two weeks in Paul Newman's Barrettstown Camp.
- Nursing and therapeutic training programs: Volunteer nurses, dentists, surgeons, and
physical/occupational/speech-language therapists travel to Chernobyl affected regions to work directly with children in understaffed institutions and provide much needed training to their local counterparts. Training is an important aspect of our mission because it allows local citizens to become self sufficient and adept at solving their own problems. - Community centers and programs that reduce poverty: Targeting the most under served and at risk communities with committed and visionary local leadership, we build community centers that serve a wide variety of needs . . . day care for working parents, therapeutic services for disabled children, child care classes, vocational training and employment services, microcredit facilities, after school and homework help, computer centers, and more. We have completed these centers in the Belarusian communities of Zhytkovichi and Petrikov, and will follow with centers in Buda Kashaleva and Glutsk. We believe that these community centers will restore communities and and making a lasting and long term impact on people's lives.
- "Homes of Hope:" Foster homes and at home care for disabled and ill children: CCPI is committed to programs
that offer families alternatives to institutionalizing their children and allow children to be raised in loving homes of their own. Today, we have put together 25 foster families -- "homes of hope" -- each raising children who previously lived in orphanages. Another program takes seriously ill children off waiting lists for orphanages by managing home-help services and training for their families. A hospice program in the Belarusian city of Gomel provides medical and psychological support for families who care for their critically ill children in their homes.
- Independent living program for mentally and physically disabled teens: Last year, 10 young men who were about to be transfered to a dismal and overcrowded adult mental institutions
where they would spend the rest of their lives, segregated from society. Today they are learning to live independently in their own home, a terrace of six accessible apartments built by volunteers and funded by individual and corporate sponsors. This is the first project of its kind in Belarus. We hope to repeat this "proof of concept" that young people with a variety of mental and physical abilities can, with support and training, live independently.
