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Natalia Maybach: The temptation to put things off is very strong.

14 march 2023

In our March interview with Natalia Maybach, president of the Kindness Without Borders charitable foundation, run in the “About People and Good Deeds” column, we are discussing SIBUR's charitable campaign in celebration of the International Women's Day trying to establish how good deeds get initiated.

Natalia, how did you start your work in the community- and welfare sector?
- I started working for social service centers quite some time ago. I am a psychologist by training and I happened to work at a hospital and at a children's health center. At the health center, I started off with organizing volunteer teams of school students, and that worked really well. Then I thought: why not set up my own professional non-profit organization. That was how
our charitable foundation Kindness without Borders came into being.

Why did you choose to become a psychologist?
- Perhaps this is what my calling is. That is my first and only profession. Later on, I kept upgrading my qualifications within this profession and went on to study its more specialized fields.

When I was studying psychology, I thought that I would be working with adults. But things turned out differently: at first, I worked with problem adolescents, and then with children with disabilities. I don't see myself doing anything else anymore as I really enjoy working with children.

Could you briefly tell us about the volunteering teams that you set up?
- Those were small groups of school students in grades 9 to 11 who had made a conscious choice to come to our Health Center. Together with these students, we ran awareness campaigns to promote healthy living.

What have you been able to achieve over the years that your Kindness Without Borders charity has been in existence? What are your principal achievements?
- Our key focus is on helping families raising children with disabilities. We have expanded quite significantly our rehabilitation program for children and families coming to our foundation for help.

Over these years, we have managed to win a grant of the Presidential Grants Foundation, and have received grants provided by the governor. Last year, we were voted the best social enterprise of the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug.

In addition, we have been running a number of annual campaigns that have become a tradition, including the Marathon of Gifts (a New Year campaign), March 8, a holiday celebrated on June 1 to commemorate the International Children's Day, and master classes dedicated to the World Autism Awareness Day.

And which of the foundations’ projects is your favorite? Or is there one?
- My favorite is the Mosaics of a Special Childhood, our program of rehabilitation of and assistance to families with children with disabilities. It may not be something that is always visible and festive, but it brings good results all the same. Rehabilitation boils down to a daily grind. But when you are able to help someone, you always feel a unique kind of joy when that happens.

That said, our campaigns are always vivid and memorable events that are significant and have greater visibility.

Do you have a big team working for your foundation now?
- We have a staff of twelve working with us right now. When we were starting out, there were just five of us. But if we count our regular volunteers who have been helping our foundation with its day-to-day activities, and active parents, then we could say that our team is more than 35 people strong.

What is your personal role in implementing the Foundation’s initiatives? Does this role change depending on the project?
- As a rule, I am the one who has been generating ideas for our campaigns and projects. But my role in implementing our initiatives does vary. There can be cases where I am more of an observer, whereas in other cases I am either the one who manages the project or is just a rank-and-file participant just like everybody else.

Your Foundation and SIBUR have been running the March 8 campaign for several years now. Why is this campaign so important?
- The
March 8 campaign’s target audience are mothers of gravely ill children; we put together their lists together with our city’s palliative care service. I keep saying that parents who raise children with severe conditions are real heroes. It is a 24/7 job, often without any chance of leaving one’s home. It means having to look out for signs of pain and distress at all times. The March 8 campaign is an opportunity to get out of one’s home for a couple of hours, to take one’s mind off things. To really appreciate the importance of these campaigns, one just has to see the faces of these mothers at least once. They socialize with each other; they see that their situation is no worse than that of others around them. They realize that they are needed, that they are not alone in this world, that people care about them and empathize with them.

Inclusion as a subject of public discourse is becoming increasingly visible in Russia. What do you think could be the reason for that?
- First of all, this has to do with a growing number of registered cases of children who are born with certain disabilities and illnesses. Plus, the methods and tools that are used for diagnosing such disabilities and diseases are evolving, too.

Secondly, it is clear that the government is taking steps to create an accessible environment and to conduct a public debate on the topic of inclusion. There is more transparency in this field, and we are all starting to hear more about it. While it was not customary to publicly discuss this topic in the past, inclusion is something that is now very much talked about.

We are now turning to those of our readers who would want to do something good, but haven't yet made this happen. What is the very first step that one would need to take?
- The most important thing is to start doing something despite being too busy or not having enough time. You have to recognize that you bear a personal responsibility for a certain cause and muster up all your willpower for that. But once you start doing something, it gets easier as you get along. The temptation to put things off is always strong. If you keep procrastinating all the time, tomorrow will never come.

And finally, let me ask you our traditional question about your further plans. What projects are you planning to implement this year and perhaps next year?
- We have a dream that has not yet been materialized. We want to establish a program for arranging birthday parties for gravely ill children, a special service that would include visits to these children's homes. This is something we're working on right now.

With what’s going on in our country and around the world right now, we have applied for and won a grant for providing humanitarian aid to refugees. This is a new focus area on the foundation's agenda that we are just getting started on.