Charitable Outreach

We have supported a number of projects, both local & international, in the past and are currently reviewing our charitable outreach activity with a view to establishing a new programme, locally focused, and targeting charities that support children, the sick and the elderly

Do contact us if you have any suggestions for suitable local charities for us to support

We recognise the existing good work carried out in St Petersburg and the surrounding region by the following charities which have in the past been supported by Anglican parishes in the UK:

Caring Hands Russia is a small charity led by a team from various UK churches that for many years each summer, pre-Covid, sent a group of volunteers to repair & improve the fabric of children’s homes, rehabilitation centres & shelters in St Petersburg & the Leningrad Oblast. The group was usually led by Rev Tony Wilcox, a trustee and main coordinator of the charity, who also assisted with the Anglican Church in St Petersburg's Sunday services during these trips. While they still continue as a charity, their summer project work in Russia is currently on hold

Scripture Union St Petersburg has run children’s clubs and summer camps for street children

The Salvation Army has also been very active in St Petersburg, running projects supporting vulnerable children, the homeless and mothers & children with HIV from its base on Liteiny Prospekt (44b). NB: In early April 2025, the international leader of the Salvation Army, London-based General Lyndon Buckingham, announced that, due to the challenges currently being faced in the country, ‘including ongoing conflict, sanctions and government regulations’, Salvation Army operations in Russia would be paused indefinitely

ROOF is a charity that was set up by an Anglo-American couple in the 1990s and was originally based at St Andrew’s Anglican Church, Moscow. The charity started out providing post-orphanage education in Moscow (this has since been ‘spun off’ as Step-Up) but now focuses on post-orphanage educational, legal and social support in Pskov and the Pskov Oblast. It has more recently been renamed the Fr. Pavel Adelgeim Centre for Post-Orphanage Support, after ‘one of the most remarkable Russian Orthodox priests of his generation’, who was a dearly loved parish priest in Pskov from 1976 until his death in 2013

Love Russia is a Christian charity, based in Nottingham, that supports Russian orphans, orphanage leavers, families in crisis, disabled children & young people with learning difficulties. Several of its projects support those in & around St Petersburg, including its Genesis Project for orphanage leavers and its work with a crisis centre in the LenOblast for vulnerable women and their children

Camphill Svetlana, part of the Camphill Movement founded in Scotland in 1939 by an Austrian refugee, Karl König, and now active in over 20 countries, is a community for people with developmental disabilities that is based on an organic farm located 90 miles east of St Petersburg in the Volkhov District of the Leningrad Oblast

This 2020 Guardian article is about a photo that was taken at Camphill Svetlana by Mary Gelman, who studied photography in Petersburg. And for more on the Camphill Movement, see ‘Camphill and the Future: Spirituality and Disability in an Evolving Communal Movement’ (2020 - free Open Access book), by Dan McKanan

One other local group that we have supported is Nochlezhka, St Petersburg's (and Russia's) oldest and largest charity for the homeless. The latest edition of its very detailed directory/guide for the homeless provides useful information, from where to sleep, to DIY emergency first aid on the streets, to finding a job

Another British pioneer in charity aid to Russia and the FSU is The BEARR Trust (BEARR=British Emergency Aid to Russia and the Republics), 'founded in Moscow in 1991 by a group of British women who wanted to help mitigate the catastrophic effects on health & welfare of the collapse of the USSR' and which today is primarily a networking organisation, 'facilitating links between many small charities in the UK and elsewhere and the charitable & NGO sector across the former Soviet Union'. See this for more on BEARR and its origins

And a key role in the wider development of civil society and the charity sector in modern Russia was played by CAF Russia, founded in Moscow in 1993 by the UK-based Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) as part of its global network, and which from 2012 (until it was wound up at the end of 2024) operated as a locally registered/funded Social NGO, often branded as the Charitable Foundation for Philanthropy Development, helping to transition Russian philanthropy from Soviet-era scepticism to a structured, professional system by fostering corporate social responsibility, encouraging individual giving, and building trust in non-profit institutions

CAF Russia established the first corporate giving programme in Russia in 1998 and introduced payroll giving to the country, helped create and incubate Russia’s first community foundations (see this 2019 article), and launched the first Russian online giving platform, blago.ru, in 2008. It also helped produce a 2018 working paper, Philanthropy in Russia, which provided a snapshot of the current state of, and potential for, philanthropy in the country

For more examples of earlier British charity activity in Russia, see our October 2021 thread on Twitter, which includes the development of hospices in St Petersburg ("Hospice No.1" at Lakhta (est.1990) being the very first one in Russia) & Moscow (plus Yaroslavl & Siberia), with the first modern hospice providing palliative care having been founded in London in 1967 by Dame Cicely Saunders, whose vision to establish a home for the dying was underpinned by her Anglican faith

And for an ethnographic view of faith-based organisations working to address social problems in Moscow’s ‘compassion economy’, including the Moscow Protestant Chaplaincy, see ‘Living Faithfully in an Unjust World: Compassionate Care in Russia’ (2017) by Melissa Caldwell

Attitudes to charity in Imperial Russia, and the evolution from traditional almsgiving to organised charity, with the growth of privately founded charitable societies and public welfare, particularly in the wake of the emancipation reform of 1861, were also explored in ‘Poverty is Not a Vice: Charity, Society, and the State in Imperial Russia’ (1996), by Adele Lindenmeyr