Fun&Charity will hold its second charity festival, with games for children and adults, in Moscow’s Yekaterininsky Park on Saturday in an attempt, organizers say, to change the way locals view charity.
The event will have a hundred different things to do, organizers say, from parkour freestyle-running courses to slingshot competitions, street football and pingpong.
The aim is to allow people to engage in a range of recreational activities for a charitable cause.
“We want to make charity more popular in Russia,” said Yekaterina Suchinova, from marketing agency 360sca, which is organizing the festival. “We are doing this by showing that people can be charitable not only through money transfers, but also, for instance, by creating a logo if you’re a designer, creating a web site for a fund if you’re a programmer, or writing a lonely woman a letter every month if you’re a writer.”
Money raised at the event will go to a wide range of charities that support children, the elderly and the disabled, among others.
For the more sedentary, board games such as chess, checkers and Scrabble will be provided, and there will be classes in craftsmanship, where children can learn how to make their own toys, kites, finger puppets and dolls out of various fabrics and other materials.
An art flea market arranged by ArtGarageSale will put up products for sale, with at least 20 percent of proceeds going to charity.
Design center Artplay will also be taking part in the festival, with an art exhibition called “Who to Be?” that makes use of sculptures and other art by children.
One sponsorship contribution to the festival came from Aktsia magazine, whose staff drank liters of condensed milk to provide dozens of empty cans to be used as targets for the festival’s slingshot competition.
A number of other companies have sponsored the festival, including the maker of Old Spice deodorants, whose brand manager noted on the Fun&Charity web site that the company wants to “show that charity is something dignified for real men.”
The first Fun&Charity festival saw more than 200 participants, 3,000 guests and managed to raise a total of 84,590 rubles for various charities.
Visitors can choose whether to pay the optional entry fee of 100 rubles.
The Fun&Charity Fest takes place on Saturday at Yekaterininsky Park located between Parkovaya Ulitsa and Akademichesky Prospekt. Metro Dostoevskaya. Tel. 251-9784, http://community.livejournal.com/funandcharity.
