There are many reasons why Kharkov Childrens Fund is an important charity to help. But it is perhaps best to understand it on a very personal basis, as told by Michael, one of the charity founders:

Eastern Europe is a fascinating mix of the old and the new. Hapsburg Empire buildings combined with cement communist blocks and everywhere an air of change and growth. The people are friendly. A business meeting is bound to last through half the night. If you sketch on the street people will come up and ask you what you are drawing and offer to show you a painting they like in a museum or a university. The education system is amazing, but the overall infrastructure, and especially the health system, is lacking the support and equipment found in Western Europe and North America.

In November 2005, I took my first trip to Kharkov, Ukraine from my home of Seattle, Washington. Kharkov is the second largest city in Ukraine. It was a trip filled with fascinating sites and sounds and I made many friends there. But I also had the occasion to visit a hospital, and was struck by how dramatically different the health care system there is. The waiting room is a dimly lit corridor with a few broken chairs. The inside temperature isn’t much different than the outside temperature. (Very very cold.) You are expected to bring your own anesthesia, scalpel and medications.

The situation is no different for the children’s hospitals. The largest children’s hospital in Kharkov, in fact, lacked a heart monitor for diagnosing certain types of heart conditions in children. This was a specialized type of EKG that would monitor and record the child's heart throughout the day, so that the doctor's could get a broad understanding of the heart condition. With this equipment the doctor's were able to determine when a child needed open heart surgery and when they could avoid it. Prior, children would either have to go without treatment, have potentially unnecessarily dangerous surgery, or make the seven hour journey to Kiev in order to get diagnosed.

My business partner and I were setting up a business in Kharkov (Elektra-Tech) and had long standing personal connections with the city. We wanted to find a way that we could give back to the community and in particular to help out children in need. We searched for existing charities that served this need but found none. We found diverse charities, religious charities, and high overhead charities. But we wanted money to go directly to helping children, not to printing up expensive advertising brochures, and not to a group where it was unclear whether the people in need really got the funds.

My partner's brother volunteered to be our onsite agent, finding a way for us to directly help children. He met with the head of the children’s hospital to see how we could help. It took several meetings and many hours to convince her that we were legitimate. The idea of a stranger from a foreign country donating equipment was completely shocking, and at first the doctor thought it was some kind of a scam. But eventually she realized we really did want to help. We arranged to buy a heart monitor. Our agent took a 7 hour train ride to Kiev to get the monitor, and the company that sold them, after learning what we were doing, gave an ever increasing discount. He then took the 7 hour train ride back and presented it to the hospital.

The staff was completely amazed and overjoyed. They wrote a beautiful letter saying ‘Благотворительная деятельность, желание помочь людям и особенно больным детям, всегда вызывают чувство глубокого уважения и уверенности, что человечность и доброта еще существуют в современном мире’ – essentially ‘charity donations, and the wish to help people, especially sick children, brings deep respect and reassures us that human kindness still exists in the modern world’.

Needless to say, the whole experience was touching, and we wanted to broaden the effort. We spoke with many charity lawyers, all of whom said it was too much of a hassle to create an international charity because of the new anti-terrorism laws and the need to have an in-country agent to make sure donations were properly handled. That just made us more resolved to do so, especially since we had an in-country agent and we had already undergone and knew the process for obtaining all of the notarized documents, translations and transfer documents . We wanted not only to help the kids, but to be able to help others help the kids as well. And thus we founded the Kharkov Children’s Fund. This is a 501c3 with an all volunteer staff. Our only expenses are legal, accounting and bank funds. Everything else goes directly to buying equipment to help children.