WELCOME TO NEW BEGINNINGS

New Beginnings (Safe Homes for Children) is a UK based charity aimed at helping children in despair in Ukraine.

Today in Kiev alone there are an est. 8,000 desperate children living on the streets and in the sewers. These Children are Ukraine’s innocent victims of poverty and despair.

We at New Beginnings are committed to trying to give some of them what could be their one and only chance in life.

The children need homes, loving, supportive foster parents and education.  We want you to help us make it happen.

 

...neglect, hunger, fear, hopelessness...

...two tiny boys with their only friend - a dog,

sleeping in the sewers, deep under ground

 

When Ukraine gained its independence in 1991, it inherited a bankrupt economy, runaway inflation and massive unemployment, resulting in children being abandoned because parents were unable to feed them.

Orphanages are now so under-funded they have become places of our worst nightmares, with not enough food, not even basic facilities and poor management, with all kinds of abuse. 

...inhuman conditions
Children from seven years old are mixing with young people up to the age of sixteen, who have been sexually active from a very young age.  The brave run away to take their chance living on the streets as a better alternative. 

New Beginnings Charity was registered in June 2001 by Patricia Harrison MBE (Chairperson and Founder)

In 1995 Pat Harrison first visited Kiev on a fact-finding mission. She had previously hosted a party of 6 & 7 year old children affected by the Chernobyl disaster who came from Belarus to visit the UK to improve their health. While in Ukraine Pat visited orphanages, children’s hospitals and young offenders prisons. Her findings were distressing – no medication, poor conditions, buildings needing repair, doctors and nurses not paid for up to 2 years and a general feeling of hopelessness. Pat went back to the UK and gathered a group of friends to start helping the children of Ukraine and in 2001 formed New Beginnings, a UK Charity Organisation, dedicated to help children in crisis. The ethics of the Charity is:
  • All projects to be managed and staffed by Ukrainians as opposed to foreigners,
  • All purchases to be made in Ukraine to put money into local economy as opposed to bringing in aid from abroad,
  • No-one working for the Charity in UK to get paid
  • To work where possible with the Ukrainian authorities, Government, TV and general public, honouring at all times Ukrainian traditions and laws

 As a result, here are a few of our main successful projects – (click here)

If you require anymore information please get in touch!

We can only help these children with the help of

people like you….  Thank you.