There’s always a crowd of people around the Dobra Lystivka (Good Postcard) stand in Kyiv bookstore Ye because of the charity project’sshock value.
And draw attention they do.
Some buyers go for postcards with cute
animals. Others have snapped up more provocative cards, such as one portraying
a pair of young men wearing poppy wreaths on their heads, who are about to kiss
each other. Others buy the “Horror of Veryovka” card, which features a skeletal
figure dressed in Ukrainian national dress clutching a hangman’s rope and the
words “Welcome to Ukraine.” Some cards feature the portrait of the
controversial historical figure Stepan Bandera, who led the Organization of
Ukrainian Nationalists during and after World War II.
“Last year, postcards with national symbols
were the most popular,” says Lilia Omelianenko, co-founder of the Dobra
Lystivka charity project. “Now people are looking for cute ones to distract
themselves a bit from war and death.”
Dobra Lystivka started over a year ago to
raise money to help children living with disabilities. It has issued thousands
of postcards featuring artwork by more than 25 artists from around the world, raising thousands
of hryvnias along the way.
“We’re trying to attract
society’s attention to the needs of disabled children with our postcards,” Omelianenko says.
When artists learn that the charity fund
collects money for disabled children, they allow Dobra Lystivka to reproduce their
expensive work for free, says Illya Strongovsky, the project’s co-founder.
Some of the artwork that the project
re-prints costs several thousand dollars, according to Omelyanenko.
The famous Japanese illustrator
Takashi Yamamoto, Lithuanian conceptual artist Gediminas Pranckevicius and
prominent modern Polish surrealist Jaroslaw Jasnikowski along with well-known Ukrainian
painters Ivan Marchuk and Oleksandr Roytburd have allallowed Dobra Lystivka to reprint
their masterpieces.
Other contributing artists are
not that well known. One of them is Kyiv illustrator Beata Kurkul, who has painted
two pictures for Dobra Lystivka. One portrays a Ukrainian soldier returning from
war, another depicts a little girl with a green military beret waiting on a hill for
her parents to come back from the front. She stands in a patch of sunlight, but
angry storm clouds form the background.
“I immediately agreed to
help Dobra Lystivka because they help children. I think all the disabled need
help, but children especially,” Kurkul says.
Before 2014 Omelianenko worked
as a marketing manager in Kyiv’s law firm and devoted her free time to her favorite hobby of postcrossing. But when the EuroMaidan revolution took place in Ukraine in
2013–2014, Omelianenko couldn’t find any postcards in Ukrainian shops depicting the
EuroMaidan events.
So she decided to find
artists who would work on the subject and reprint their paintings on postcards
at her own expense.
Surprisingly, according to
Dobra Lystivka’s founders, the postcards turned out to be in great demand, and
their popularity is still growing, Omelianenko says. Some 4,000 postcards get
printed every three or fourth months.
The founders then decided
to convert their success into a charity. “I always wanted to do something to
help children,” Omelianenko says, adding that since April 2014 the project has
been donating money to the Mission to Ukraine charity fund, which raises funds to
help disabled children.
Mission to Ukraine has received
more than Hr 50,000 from Dobra Lystivka which went toward the purchase of ultrasound
equipment and diapers, the group’s spokeswoman Tetyana Hrasyuk told the Kyiv Post.
Both items are essential for disabled children.
Dobra Lystivka also helps in
individual cases as well. When a year ago the parents of a seven-year-old boy
with cerebral palsy asked Omelianenko and Strongovsky for money to be used for rehabilitation,
they agreed to help. Now, after a nine-month course of massage and physiotherapy,
the boy can walk 30–40 minutes per day, Omelianenko says proudly.
Dobra Lystivka has big
plans for the future. It wants to donate money to centers in Zhytomyr that use
non-traditional methods to treat disabled children, like the use of horses in
what is called hippotherapy and dogs to engage with kids, according to Omelianenko.
Dobra Lystivka postcards are sold in Ukraine and abroad for Hr 7.
For more detailed information visit dobralystivka.com
Kyiv Post staff writer NataliyaTrach can be reached at [email protected]
