At present the workers of the project « Young Mother” supports 3 mothers with their kids under 2 years old. In the nearest future one more lady with her 3 little kids is going to join the program. 

The young mothers come from different parts of Ukraine and even Russia. They get here social, financial, psychological and medical help. Most of young mothers, especially those who are graduates from big state boarding schools have no skills of everyday life, they can’t cook, they don’t know how to look after their kids, they cannot manage their money. So here they are taught how to conduct life and form the budget. They don’t only get theoretical knowledge of things here; they learn to apply it in practice. Just recently one of the mothers was doing shopping in one supermarket where she was learning to shop properly and she did it under the watch of the worker of the project. And she admitted it wasn’t so easy for her. 

An integral part of the adaptation of the young mothers is the birthday parties and other celebrations. The workers of the charity fund “Pilgrim” try their best to create warm cozy domestic atmosphere for the mothers and their kids in future to be able to create such a n atmosphere in their own houses.  

This project closely cooperates with the state services, mainly with the local Family and Youth Services of Mariupol. These services direct such mothers to the program and they help to make official papers for the mothers. The project has good results. Within it so many mothers and kids changed and they were before about to be separated due to incompetency of mothers. Some of mothers had addictions and lived separately from their kids, other mothers just needed help and support. Also within this period many separated families got back to each other and some new families were created since kids need not only a mother but a father too.  

The manager of the project “Young mother” at the Charity Fund “Pilgrim” Irina Matyushina: “There are some different situations in life that provoke mothers to leave their kids. We do not judge them but do our best to render the help for them to be able to be reunited with their children and for the kids not to have to live as orphans having their parents still alive. Our task is to try our best to keep biological family, to help women to restore in physical and spiritual way. It is such a joy for us to see the good fruits of our work – to see kids growing up not in orphanages but with their mothers, to see new families being created and separated families to be restored!”