Liza Hollingshead is founder and head of Ecologia Trust, a Scottish charity that has worked with Russian NGOs since 1995 in the fields of youth education and environmental protection. Although she works in a variety of areas, her principal focus at present lies in providing assistance to Kitezh Children´s Community. Kitezh is a group of families living near the village of Baryatino in Kaluga Oblast that provides homes to orphan children. The Citizen spoke with Hollingshead about her charity work and her goals for the future.

How long have you been working in Russia? What prompted you to begin doing work here in the first place?

I visited Russia for the first time in 1988, during Perestroika, and simply fell in love with the country. It was a life-changing experience - it completely changed my view of Russia and the world, really. Before that, I had the classic Cold War impression of the Soviet Union as being full of cold, inhuman people, but I was intrigued, because I had read Russian literature, and the images drawn by Tolstoy and Chekhov were quite different from what we heard about Soviet society. So, when I arrived on May 1 and was immediately swept up in the May Day parade by smiling, open, warm and curious students from Leningrad University, I simply fell in love with them and with the idea of bringing our two societies together through our young people. I had to find ways to return to Russia and to bring my new Russian friends to visit Britain.

My first big project was to organize an ambitious youth exchange between the Soviet Union, Britain and South Africa, where I grew up. A year later, 45 young people from these three countries traveled together for five weeks through the Kalahari and Okavango in Botswana. The following year we all went to Lake Baikal in Siberia and then to other places. We even took a film crew from Leningrad Television with us! It was an amazing experience - quite mad, looking back on it, but fantastically interesting to see how these three very different cultures managed to live together in very primitive situations.

After that, I ran Citizen Diplomacy Tours to Russia for several years, organized camps for Western students, worked with scientists in the Urals, and organized exchanges for children, students and adults in both directions, until the climate changed. Suddenly it no longer seemed exotic to meet across the divide - and then I was introduced to Kitezh Children´s Community. At that point, we set up a charity to work more formally with Russian NGOs.

What exactly is Kitezh Children´s Community?

Since 1992, Kitezh Children´s Community has functioned as a non-government, non-profit partnership of foster families who offer homes and schooling for orphaned Russian children in a rural area of Kaluga Oblast.

Kitezh is an exciting place. The residents are foster families who live together on a large piece of land. They provide a happy, joyful refuge for Russian children who have been abandoned or orphaned. As far as I am aware, it is the only exclusively child-centered community in Russia. Education is the main focus. The Kitezh School is now accredited through high school.

At present, Kitezh consists of 20 permanent residents with 35 children, mostly adopted, but some their own. They live on 100 hectares of land, a mixture of agricultural land and wild forest, with a lake nearby. In only 10 years, they have built 12 houses, a schoolhouse, a communal dining hall and a beautiful little wooden church. They have a farm with livestock, poultry, extensive vegetable gardens and a big potato field. In the summer months many volunteers and students, both Russian and foreign, come to Kitezh to help with building, working in the gardens, on the farm and with the children.

The Kitezh way of fostering and educating children has already proved to be a real alternative to the Dickensian state system of orphanages and childcare institutions in Russia.

Could you briefly describe a few of your programs at Kitezh and elsewhere?

Now we work primarily to support Kitezh with a foreign-volunteer program, an "Adopt a Godchild" program [through which adults from outside Kitezh can sponsor a particular child] and social-work and therapeutic training for people at Kitezh with British professionals. With the help of many people from all over the world, we have built several houses for families. We also work in partnership with ISAR Moscow with an environmental project called "Kinoschool." We still run the students´ ecology camps and arrange independent travel to various places in Russia as well.

Where does your funding come from?

Wherever we can find it. Our independent travel business helps to support Ecologia Trust in Scotland. Charity Know How U.K. funded our Social Work and Therapeutic Training project, and Partnerships in the Non-Profit Sector, a British Know How Fund, provided money for the Kinoschool project. The new Kitezh Information Center in Moscow is funded by the British Community Fund. However, we rely largely on support from private foundations, individuals and companies.

What are some recent developments with your organization?

We are now embarking on a brand-new project to open a Kitezh Information Center in Moscow in partnership with ISAR. The biggest project we have undertaken so far is scheduled to start in April. It will make it much easier for people to get information about Kitezh and to visit and of course support it.

What are your relations like with Russian organizations?

Our partners in Kitezh have established very good relations with their local administration in Kaluga Oblast. Over the years, the region has provided them with land, a tarred road, water and electricity. They have promised to put in a gas line soon - and also a decent telephone line. We live in hope!

What do you feel is the greatest accomplishment of Kitezh to date?

Probably the school. Achieving accreditation to teach to the end of high school is great recognition from the Ministry of Education of the high standard of their work. They now have a dedicated team of teachers, most of whom are also foster parents, and the foundations for the school are stronger than ever before. The children receive a high level of individual attention, which makes it possible for them to overcome the trauma of their early years and be able to study.

But I think the progress of individual children there is the most touching and impressive. One little boy, Igor, came to Kitezh when he was six years old. He had watched his mother die in a road accident and at first his drawings were only in black, with bombs and horrible images. He was very aggressive and had almost no attention span. He had experienced such shock that he was incapable of functioning as a normal six-year-old. Now, after three years, Igor draws rainbows. He sings to himself as he walks along the pathways. But this takes a long time, with individual teaching and a lot of loving care from everyone, not only his foster parents. That is the gift that Kitezh offers children.

How many children´s lives has Kitezh affected?

About 45 children have passed through Kitezh in the past 10 years - some are now in the army, in college or at a university in Moscow, a great accomplishment. As they grow up, they make room for more children, and of course as the community expands, there will be more houses for more families and, therefore, more children.

How does Kitezh go about finding children? How does the community function?

Children are referred to Kitezh by local orphanages; sometimes they have been found at temporary shelters; in some cases, Kitezh has been asked by the police to take children who were on the streets. They hold winter and summer camps for children from orphanages, and if some of those children ask to stay at Kitezh, and there is a family that feels in tune with them, they make a request to the local authorities to foster them. It sometimes takes a long time but, in the end, the children who most want to live in Kitezh usually get there. One little girl wanted to move to Kitezh so badly that she herself persuaded her grandmother and the orphanage she lived in to let her go. And she succeeded!

What makes Kitezh unusual?

The most important thing for all children is to have a family and a sense of belonging. In Kitezh, not only do the children have a family, parents, brothers and sisters, but they have a community where they have a sense of belonging, a vision for their future and adults around them who believe in them and will do everything in their power to give them the best education and start in life that is possible. It´s a wonderful opportunity for kids who otherwise would have no support at all in life. Orphanages simply cannot provide any of this.

What does the future of Kitezh hold?

The long-term goal is to grow to a village of about 50 adults and up to 200 children - and then create other Kitezhs all over Russia. It may sound like a dream, but it´s a necessary one for homeless children. Children are our future, the future of Russia, and we are all dedicated to doing as much as we can to give orphan children a chance to make a new start and become valuable, innovative members of Russian society. That´s why I am involved.

How can our readers participate or help Kitezh?

They can help with donations of any kind. The Kitezh mini-bus is on its last legs - maybe someone has a bus to give away? . One Russian business has recently donated winter coats for all the children - can you imagine how expensive it would be to buy them? A great gift.

Our Godparents scheme is very popular abroad - these are not real Godparents in the religious sense, but they and the children enjoy this personal relationship very much, and send one another gifts and letters constantly. I think Godparents closer by would have even more fun, as they could easily go and visit.

Visitors to Kitezh are always welcome. We hope to finish the Guest House this spring to provide a comfortable place for visitors to stay. It´s a great place for a long weekend - beautiful nature, children running about freely everywhere, and of course - a wonderful banya!

(For further information, contact Ecologia Trust´s Moscow representative, Mila Bogdan, by phone at 251-7617 or by e-mail at mbogdan@online.ru.)