News

11/11/2011

OKD Foundation Gave Awards

The best non-profit projects and personality of the year in non-profit sphere got awards of the OKD Foundation on Thursday, 10 November. It was the third time the Foundation handed out a symbolic statuette. The public voted for winners. The AWT Group is not only a partner but also a donor to the OKD Foundation. Through a membership in the board of directors it co-decides on the support of specific projects. This year for example it contributed to the construction of a children's traffic playground in a kindergarten on Exile Street in Ostrava-Poruba or the repair of a historic steam locomotive from a Railway Museum in Jaroměř.

Basic awards were given based on areas that the OKD Foundation supports regularly. In the program called For Health, the first place went to a Summer House civic association from Prague, which prepares young people from children's homes for their start in life, among other things by residency in a training apartment.  The winner of the program called For Joy is an initiative from Karviná called Wide Open and its summer multicultural festival, which was organized by dozens of volunteers. In the program called For The Future, a statuette and a check for ten thousand was awarded to a representative of a Charity of St. Alexander in Ostrava, which built a protected workshop for 50 handicapped people in the facility of a former coal mine and is now finishing reconstruction of another building where a protected housing will be located. In the program called “For Europe", which helps non-profit organizations to finance preparations of projects for subsidies from the European Union, people gave the largest number of votes to a Maternity and Family Center Krůček Svitavy, which is preparing an unconventional system of cooperation between parents with small children and seniors.

The specialty of the OKD Foundation is awarding media that help to promote non-profit organizations and deal with the topic of social responsibility of companies. In the category Media Act of the Year the main award was given to the editor Dalibor Dostál of a weekly Profit for a unique series mapping the functioning of corporate foundations. A statuette for Positive News was awarded to a MF Dnes journalist Ivana Karásková for a report thanks to which a magazine for children’s homes got almost 200 thousand crowns from other donors instead of 30 thousand that an endowment fund of Mr. and Mrs. Klaus refused to send because of a critical article.

The OKD Foundation made Česlav Santarius, enthusiast and at the same time a professional who 20 years ago started to build a charitable organization Silesian Congregation, a personality of the year. This year, when he retired, the congregation provided 95 social services to more than 6,000 users and it became an example for similar organizations in the Czech Republic as well as many foreign partners.

The OKD Foundation was established in 2008 and it has supported over a thousand projects with a total amount of over 175 million crowns ever since. Thus it has become one of the biggest foundations in the Czech Republic, whereas it distributes a significant part of finances (around 80 percent) among quality North-Moravian projects.