Since 1997, ROOF Orphan Opportunity Fund has been providing educational assistance, mentoring, and vital legal and support services to orphans, enabling them to thrive in society with dignity and confidence. Our programs adapt organically to meet the changing needs of beneficiaries.

ROOF’s first business plan focused on sending talented yet underpaid teachers into orphanages as mentors and “homework buddies”, ensuring children wouldn’t fall behind in school. From 1997 we piloted projects in 4 Moscow orphanages, eventually extending this work to 12 Moscow orphanages and one special-needs orphanage in the Pskov Region.

As our young friends left their orphanages – which were both shrinking in size with rising domestic adoption and increasingly able to fund work originally outsourced to ROOF – our focus shifted to meeting the urgent needs of orphanage leavers. ROOF opened its Moscow Post-Orphanage Education Centre in 2000; for more than a decade this was ROOF’s largest project, housed at St. Andrew’s Anglican Church in Moscow. This work is now fully funded by Russian donors and continues under the auspices of two separate Russian charities: Big Change and StepUp.

From 2001, ROOF has also focused on providing or obtaining housing for orphanage leavers in Pskov Region, many of whom would otherwise face life-long institutionalization. Initial programs surrounded one special needs orphanage in Belskoye-Ustye, near Porkhov, Pskov Region. Here ROOF pioneered post-orphanage living programs called “social hotels”. Each social hotel had a team of “house parents”, who lived with orphanage leavers on a rotating basis. In parallel, ROOF employees battled for the state to honour the post-orphanage housing rights of those who were successfully adapting to life outside the institution. Gradually, we began to win these housing cases in local courts, forcing a reinterpretation of laws not originally applied to graduates of special needs orphanages. Our program in Porkhov is now a locally-funded charity called Rostok. By the 2010s, Belskoye-Ustye orphanage itself opened a state-funded social hotel program based on the ROOF/Rostok model, moving children into local families or social hotels at a much earlier age, meaning the virtual elimination of traditional institutionalization for orphans with special needs in this region of Russia.