SoftServe Charity Opens ‘Positive Room’ for Children in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine

AUSTIN, Texas—Jan. 25, 2019—SoftServe, a leading digital authority and consulting company, announces its Open Eyes charity fund opened Ukraine’s first ‘Positive Room’ for children at the Ivano-Frankivsk Regional Phthisiopneumology Center (RPPC). The room—in cooperation with the doctors of the child department of pulmonary, tuberculosis, and meningitis—creates a comfortable and vivid space where children can spend free time during treatment.

Every year nearly 200 children in the Ivano-Frankivsk region become patients at the RPPC’s department of pulmonary tuberculosis and meningitis. During prolonged treatments—which can last two months or more—the children cannot attend school and are often isolated from friends and family. Additonally, the department designed to host 30 hospital beds is often overcrowded.

“We urgently needed the ‘Positive Room’ as many children stay with us for six to 12 months,” said Oksana Golubchak, head of the department of pulmonary, tuberculosis and meningitis for children at the RPPC. “Being a long-term patient confined to a hospital bed can negatively influence the emotional well-being of the children. They need a positive experience to temporarily distract them from their illness.”

The ‘Positive Room’ gives the children a place to spend their free time to have fun, read, catch up on school curriculum, and develop creative skills. The room is split into four zones—creative, playful, reading, and educational—all filled with selected toys and materials to boost the child’s development.

“We wanted to create a space for the children to have a positive experience and we tried to reflect it in the design, planning, and functionality of the room,” said Ulyana Budenkevych, director of SoftServe’s Open Eyes charity fund. “The room has a full-time teacher to educate the children and local volunteers arrange leisure activities and creative workshops.”

The ‘Positive Room’ at RPPC is the first of four planned projects in Ukraine. The goal is to create similar spaces in Kharkiv, Dnipro, and Rivne. The project is financed by donations from SoftServe, its associates, and other donors to the charity fund. Project partners include design-studio Dnes and Ikea-Mania store.

The Open Eyes fund opened its first ‘Positive Room’ in October 2017, with the cooperation of the association ‘Pozytywne.com’ and other patners, at child clinic of endocrinology and diabetes in Wroclaw, Poland. The idea for the ‘Positive Room’ was originally submitted to the Open Eyes charity fund by associates of SoftServe’s development center in Wroclaw.