...Dear Community,

 This is a request for your support. 

 We are a group of young parents who live locally. We would love to find a more sustainable a balance between the 24/ 7 caring for our children and our personal and work lives, and we would love to create a creative, nourishing space this year for some of our little ones. 

This is a spontaneous crowdfunding campaign directed to ask for your support and we are open from the help of anyone who feels the call- whether you already expressed interest in supporting community projects, whether you love to support the wellbeing of children and the families who primarily care for them or whether this is a totally new idea but that you feel the call to support the collective growth of the community through this new project. 

The ones making this call are a small collective of families with children in Arillas and surrounding areas who are in search of new creative ways to let our children play and learn with each other and with the environment, to create healthy personal development and a beginning step to time away from home for the little ones. The collective holistic childcare project would also give precious time for us parents to do our jobs which feed our families and to develop our personal skills and talents so that we do not burn out and bring our stress and frustration home to our children.

Within this group we each have 1 or 2 children in our core family structure, we are expats, meaning we do not have blood family members around us who can help us in any beautifully and constructive way, many of us are still diving into the greek social system without being completely part of it, meaning we all have little to no help from family or government for the care of our children- it all falls on our shoulders to some extent. It is indeed a free choice to live here and we are proud of it, though it brings with it a lot of challenges.

We are therefore organizing ourselves to create a situation where young children can be playfully guided and taken care for few hours a day to give us as parents the opportunity to have some time to breathe, time to work and also free time which is vital to have a healthy management of the family.

We are already moving and creating a child care space, cause we consider the idea to have a group of child sitting instead of a individual baby sitting time schedule, much more inspiring and helpful for the children, and also financially affordable for us families. 

To have such a playful program for our children indeed implies a series of sides costs that We ask support for:

-aside well trained and dedicated people to take care of the children, to have a backup assistant in case of illness of the main caretakers (600eu)

-to have adequate and positive toys/books to inspire the children and materials to make the space adeguate for children(500eu)

-to properly clean the space for the children (600eu)

-to have heating system costs covered in the winter time (500eu)

-to have a sufficient buffer to cover possible emergency costs, maintenance of the building iron parts etc (600eu)

-to cover financial issues/crises of the single families for health or travel issues (1600eu)

We will find our way to cover our costs ourselves in one way or another with what we can, and it will work out greatly as it is, but again all this management and organization it takes away a lot of energy, time and space from the daily lives of us parents, which we could use even more effectively for the life in our community, and the budget is a struggle for most of us to achieve. 

There are also the seeds of a holistic and democratic, independent and legally accepted schooling system to be based on Corfu for the older children in the community. This is the biggest dream that many of us have and this separate project will also be fundraising and hopefully growing into reality in the coming months (and years!).  

If you are interested in the development of the project and you want to support it please follow the website: https://www.boschettodemocraticschoolcorfu.com/

and get in contact with the organizers to find ways of collaborating together!

For the moment we plant the seed of this simple collective childcare dream for the year ahead and any support you give will help cover the costs for the little ones taking their first moments away from their families into a kind and creative space. 

 We ask this in the name of community- as this is a word that is used a lot! 

 Any donation you feel to give in whatsoever amount is welcome and highly appreciated and thanked and will be used directly to support the families and the children in this project. 

Wishing this way can organically bring to live in a good way all together

 Many thanks for reading, for sharing and for your support. "

Parents group of Arillas and sorroundings

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