Russian Help Fund to the rescue

Sergei Sevastianov, 15, suffers from hemophilia. He is one of hundreds of patients aided by the Russian Help Fund because his mother wrote to the newspaper Kommersant. PHOTO: Courtesy of Kommersant

A towheaded boy stares up out of the black and white newspaper page, his arm hooked up to an IV, a pair of medical scissors lying beside him on the bed. His treatment costs more than his family can afford.

The boy's appearance here, at the back of the Russian newspaper Kommersant, could help raise the money needed to save his life.

Once a month, Kommersant publishes individual appeals for such cases that are handpicked by its social organization, Russian Help Fund. Many of its profiles feature sick children, unemployed mothers and families in crisis.

In a country where much of the public is skeptical about contributing to large, faceless organizations, Kommersant has found a way to link readers directly with the people they want to help.

Much like The New York Times publishes appeals for its Neediest Cases Fund through its foundation's holiday charity campaign, Kommersant advertises the Russian Help Fund's neediest cases year-round.

"Nobody believes in charitable funds - that's the reason we're not registered as one," said Lev Ambinder, director of Russian Help Fund. "We're registered as a social organization. We don't even have a bank account."

Since the fall of Communism, Russia has struggled to care for an increasingly ill and economically strapped population. This past February, the Russian news service RIA reported that the country's mortality rate rose from 14.7 to 16.3 per 1,000 people from 2000 to 2002. As of two years ago, the Russian government was spending less of its GNP on health care than it had in the 1960's, according to a 2001 RAND study, which also discovered that some of the country's doctors "earn less than drivers or baby-sitters." While Russia's unemployment rate dropped to 7.1 percent last year, monthly average incomes remained low at $141.

In an effort to assist where the government cannot, Russian Help Fund has raised approximately $3.9 million over the past seven years - all without depositing a single check. Rather than acting as a repository for contributions, Russian Help Fund enables readers to send money straight to families or to hospitals providing medical care.

The Fund's staff of three substantiates applicants' requests for assistance - calling local health authorities to make sure that patients have registered, for example. They do not, however, make executive decisions about where to direct funds after the individual cases are chosen. They simply publish the amount required for a certain procedure, treatment or need and let their readers respond.

Russian Help Fund grew out of a conversation between Ambinder, 58, and Kommersant's founding editor Vladmir Yakovlev in 1996. Readers were sending letters to the paper asking for help and Yakovlev thought Ambinder might be best suited to respond. Having worked as a regional correspondent for a number of years, Ambinder was familiar with much of Russia's geography and the particular needs associated with different areas.

"There were bags of letters coming in," Ambinder remembered. "He showed them to me and said I was the only one who would know what to do with them."

Such voluminous correspondence was not a new phenomenon in Russian newsrooms. During the Soviet era, it was not unusual for newspapers to receive floods of letters requesting assistance of some kind or another, according to Celestine Bohlen, a former Moscow correspondent for the New York Times. "People would write to comment and complain," Bohlen said. "It gave them a social voice when they didn't have a traditional way to solve problems."

Charged with creating a formal approach for responding to such appeals, Ambinder came up with the idea of publishing some of the letters verbatim in the newspaper, which has a circulation of less than 130,000.

Currently, there are no official figures on individual giving in Russia, according to Elena Topoleva, director of the Agency for Social Information, a Moscow-based news service that focuses on the work of non-profits. The public's response to Ambinder's idea was so overwhelming, however, that the appeals turned into a monthly feature, both in Kommersant and Domovoy, an interior décor magazine owned by the same publisher. They are the only media outlets that publish charitable appeals on a regular basis, Topoleva said.

Each month, the Fund receives approximately 200 letters asking for help. Ambinder calls the majority of correspondence "self-propelled" from individuals but some of it comes from organizations like Civic Assistance Committee for Involuntary Migrants, a Moscow-based non-profit organization.

The Committee began in 1990 when women affiliated with a Russian literary journal decided to informally pool money and clothing for Armenian refugees fleeing persecution in Azerbaijan. Today the group assists hundreds of refugees a week, offering free legal advice, education and health care. Its own budget stretched to the limit, the Committee often cannot give money directly to the individuals it serves. In some of those cases, it appeals to Russian Help Fund for assistance.

During a recent visit to the Committee's basement office off of Dolgorukovskaya, visitors watched Program Assistant Elena Burtina open electronic photos on her computer of immigrant children who have benefited from the Russian Help Fund. A black-haired girl posed with her violin - the Fund helped send her to a school where she could develop her musical talent. A small Chechen boy cuddled up to his tired-looking mother - thanks to the Fund, he is receiving treatment for his cerebral palsy.

Burtina explained that the boy's original sponsor had refused to continue paying for his medical care after the Moscow theater hostage crisis and had written an angry letter to his mother to cancel the donations. "After the Fund knew about this letter, they printed several more appeals," Burtina said. "At last another sponsor stepped up in the middle of treatment."

The Committee receives the bulk of its funding from Western or international aid organizations. It does not have a large individual donor base and accepted its first Russian corporate donation last year. Since the non-profit is always looking for institutional money, Burtina appreciates the opportunity to offer up particular cases to the Russian Help Fund for consideration.

Since its inception, the Fund has helped hundreds of families affected by national catastrophes, including relatives of sailors lost in the Kursk submarine disaster of 2000 and families of those who died last fall in the Moscow theater hostage crisis.

While the Fund does not keep formal records of its donors, Ambinder estimates that the majority are private businessmen and their families. Over the years, Ambinder has managed to keep the look and feel of the appeals home-spun, while organizing pages around particular themes like health or education. In addition to printing a feature that focuses on an individual case, Ambinder still includes verbatim appeals. He has also added a follow-up section that shows readers how past applicants are faring, as well as a column of his own highlighting general social service concerns.

Through his experience, Ambinder has learned that donors respond less to issues affecting the elderly than they do to child poverty or immediate family needs. "Readers want to save people," he said. "They will help pay to hook up a gas stove."

With grants from Open Society Institute and Ford Foundation, Kommersant recently launched a Russian Help Fund website which enables visitors to give over the Internet. "Our foundation can't help people in trouble, but we occasionally received such kind of requests," Slava Bakhmin, Open Society Institute's director of Program Activity Coordination in Russia, said about his group's decision to help fund the launch. "Ambinder and his team already had impressive experiences and results acting through the newspaper."

Ambinder estimates that between Kommersant, Domovoy and the website, the Fund is well on its way to raising $1 million annually.

Ambinder credits the Fund's growth to its simplicity. "We only deal with concrete cases: This is the problem, this is the solution," he said, manning the phones alone while his two staff members were out sick. "That's why we are successful."

top

A project of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism made possible by the Scripps Howard Foundation. Comments? E-mail us.

Copyright © 2003 The Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.
All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.