ROOF was founded in 1997 based on a project started by Arthur Stracinski, a retired New York high school teacher. He had a desire to help Russian orphans, because his mother was an orphan from the Ukraine. After running a pilot program teaching in an orphanage in Russia, he asked Georgia Williams, who became ROOF's first Executive Director, to write a business plan. Georgia started visiting orphanages and asking orphanage directors what the biggest problems were. All the directors said the same thing - the children go out into the world utterly unprepared to find employment and with a seriously sub-standard level of education. Thus, the children very often are drawn into gangs or prostitution, end up in jail, or worse; in the city of Moscow official statistics say that 10% are dead within the first year of 'graduation' from state orphanages.

Each year in the Russian Federation approximately 15,000 young adults 'graduate' from the orphanage system utterly unprepared to support or to take care of themselves in a country where, at present, it is difficult for even the most privileged to find gainful employment. Generation after generation of down-and-outs coming from Russian orphanages has led to snowballing prejudice against any child who happens to have grown up without his parents. With such grim prospects, it is small wonder that only a meagre minority of the children in Russia's orphanage system look forward to getting up in the morning or care at all what the next day will bring. Thus, ROOF's main goal was firmly established and remains to increase the motivation, self-esteem and responsibility levels of orphaned children through education and professional opportunities.

ROOF's first classes started in October, 1998. During the 1998-99 school year 17 ROOF teachers (all Russian nationals) taught about 200 children in four Moscow orphanages. The depth and breadth of ROOF's programmes expanded quickly over the following few years. ROOF enjoys a good reputation amongst orphanage directors. There is an ever increasing number of requests to include our teachers in orphanage educational programmes. Our teachers also staff the ROOF Post-Orphanage Education Centre which opened in October 1999 to help orphanage graduates complete their secondary education, get jobs and pass college and institute entrance exams. All told, ROOF educational programmes constituted over 7,000 hours of teaching in 1999. That class time is only the base upon which a rich tapestry of friendships and social interaction has been woven between our teachers, children from various orphanages and other Moscow school children who participate in some of our programmes.

Why Such Rapid Growth?

ROOF's rapid growth over the first couple of years is not a mystery; the growth process is driven entirely by the supply of educated, underpaid teachers and the demand for better quality education in orphanages. ROOF management needs only to provide an organised structure and find the financial resources to allow the growth process to drive itself. In Russia, there are many highly trained professionals out of work. Many of these are teachers or other professionals who are more than capable of teaching Physics, Mathematics, Russian Language or basic life skills at a primary or secondary level. Contributions, and especially the leveraged value of foreign currency contributions, enable our talented teachers to invest their energy in building Russia's future by teaching and bringing up orphanage children whilst receiving a fair wage on which they can support their families. The average teacher in Moscow earns $30 a month, although the cost of living is not much less than any of the major cities of the US or Europe.

Attention to Quality

Whilst experiencing such rapid growth it is very important to make sure that quality control mechanisms are in place. At the beginning of the 1999-2000 school year, Irina Ryazanova, ROOF's Programme Co-ordinator by that time, devised a system whereby our teachers who work off-site report back to us every month on the results of their classes. The team of teachers working in each orphanage is headed by a curator (one of the teachers who has volunteered for that position) and regularly has its own staff meetings, in addition to ROOF's monthly teachers' meetings where all the teams come together. Each month the curator from each team is responsible for reporting back to ROOF's administration on the progress of every child in every class. Non-curator teachers may also arrange direct meetings with ROOF's Programme Co-ordinator and/or Executive Director to discuss specific problems or difficulties on Thursday or Friday each week.