Help People with Intellectual Disabilities -Serbia

Mirjana and Gordana have been friends since they were 7 years old. Living in the same small Belgrade suburb it was not unusual that they would be friends. But they did not meet at the playground. Being the only girls in town with Down’s Syndrome they met at an elementary school for kids with special needs. When they turned 18 there were no longer any educational programs available to them so they spent their days alone each in their own homes. Neither had any contact with friends or any people other than their families. They were home alone and unhappy.

KEC changed things for these two friends. Mirjana and Gordana were reunited when their parents enrolled them in the Creative Education Center KEC. It was exactly what they needed-- a creative and caring place to send their girls while they were at work. A place where the girls could grow, make new friends and continue living life. Mirjana and Gordana now spend their days at KEC participating in the wide array of programs that the center offers. Through KEC’s work placement program both Mirjana and Gordana work several hours a week at local McDonald’s restaurants. Working at “Mek”, as they say in Serbian, brings them great joy. They love engaging with the customers and the staff and they feel totally at home there.

The girls also have another interest in common. They both are avid sports fans. Mirjana loves football so she was ecstatic when KEC organized a trip to her favorite team, Partizan’s, stadium. Gordana’s sports interest are lower key. She likes the center’s exercise program. Her absolute favorite activity is the hoola hoop. She is a master at keeping them spinning and can even spin two of them at once.

KEC has brought these two friends back together and helps hundreds of other people with special needs in Belgrade stay active and social. The center’s programs are innovative and aim to keep pushing the bar higher about what each individual can achieve. Supporting KEC keeps these hoola hoops spinning and so much more.

Dear Friends,

As a loyal supporter you already know that KEC’s mission is to serve and care for people with special needs. In order to achieve this mission we are constantly exploring new ways to raise funds to keep our programs going. With fewer and fewer grants available we started to think about what KEC can do to help itself be more financially sustainable. Over 20 years of exploration we have had a lot of ideas. Not all of them good ideas. Most of them involved too much effort (most of which could not be done by the beneficiaries) and very little profit. After one idea we were stuck with an industrial food dryer and a freezer full of berries. We started to think (and to be honest worry a bit) what to do next.

We needed to come up with an idea that would use the equipment we had and be something that we could take pride in. Since the Serbian diet is very meat oriented (you won’t find a lot of quinoa on the menus) and not very health conscious we wanted to make something that would also be a healthy alternative. So we challenged ourselves to come up with a natural snack that didn’t already exist on the local market. Many reincarnations later we have the Gardenika Fruit Roll made from 100% fruit. Our fruit roll is a strip of pure fruit rolled up just waiting to be gobbled up by kids and adults alike.

In order to make this enterprise work we had to bring in as many partners as possible. We partner with the supermarkets that sell our fruit rolls (and employ many of our beneficiaries) to rescue their surplus fruit. We get those apples, bananas and strawberries immediately to our blenders and food dryers to transform them into the fruit rolls that we sell back to the markets. Our beneficiaries are involved in every aspect of the work from picking up the fruit to putting the KEC label on each bag. In the beginning we were selling a few rolls to the small corner health stores. Today, our rolls are in most of the big chain supermarkets in Belgrade.

For the moment KEC’s fruit rolls are a nano-enterprise. The production is tiny and while sales are growing they remain small. But as healthy snacks become more common in Serbia we hope that our nano-enterprise will grow into a micro-enterprise and one day a full-fledged small business. Considering that any profits we make are reinvested in KEC’s programs for people with special needs we are sure that we will succeed.

If you are in Belgrade buy a bunch of Gardenika Fruit Rolls each time you see them on the supermarket shelves. Supporting KEC helps us to continue to implement the fruit roll project as well as all our other much needed programming for people with special needs (and along the way we might help make Serbian kids and adults a little healthier).