Founded 2018
About us
A nonprofit that started with a group of middle and high school students, and is still mostly run by students.
Our story
It started with a boy calling through a fence.
In the summer of 2018, Anthony and his brother Andrew were visiting their grandparents in Kazakhstan. Across from the house was a yard, and in the yard were children. A young boy called out through the fence to their mother.
That fence was the edge of a local orphanage caring for about 30 children between six months and three years old. The family visited several times that summer, and could not leave it there.
Back home in Georgia, Andrew organised a fundraiser through his school’s Beta Club with his friend Greg Steckel. Katherine, Greg’s sister, and Anthony recruited volunteers from their middle schools. Together they collected a huge amount of toys and sent six big boxes of gently used toys to the children.
The next year the effort spread across Atlanta’s Russian-speaking communities, churches and schools, and the team grew to nine. In 2019 the four cofounders registered Gifts4Orphans as a Georgia nonprofit charity organization.
In 2020 we began supporting an orphanage in Moscow as well. By 2022, with Andrew and Greg away at college, Anthony became President and recruited new members. After Russia invaded Ukraine in March 2022, we partnered with the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, Georgia Branch, to support Ukrainian children, while continuing our work in Kazakhstan.
Over time we shifted from shipping physical donations to raising money, which goes much further. Our volunteer in Kazakhstan, Max, oversees how every dollar is spent — on food, medication and diapers, and on projects like new carpets and an accessibility ramp at the orphanage.
Where we work
The Shchuchinsk Babyhouse
Founded in 1946 with three children. Roughly 2,400 have been cared for since.
The babyhouse was established in 1946, just after the Second World War, with three children. In 1979 it moved into a new building with room for 50. Over more than seventy years it has cared for approximately 2,400 children.
Today 37 babies live there, from birth to age three. Children with complex medical needs stay until they are four.
Not every child there is an orphan. The “Nadezhda” — Hope — program places seriously ill children whose parents cannot care for them at home. Other children have parents whose parental rights were revoked.
Most of the children have significant health challenges. The conditions are genuinely good: individual wooden beds, toys, and intensive care facilities, with 86 staff members looking after them. It is far better than the alternatives.
But it can never replace home.
The Shchuchinsk Babyhouse, Akmola Region, Kazakhstan.
- Founded, with three children
- 1946
- Babies living there today
- 37
- From birth to age three
- Staff caring for them
- 86
Help us keep going
You can be part of the next project.
Give once, give monthly, or organise a drive at your school.