About Naked Heart Foundation
The Naked Heart Foundation is a charitable organization, founded by Natalia Vodianova in 2004. Its main lines of work include creating free support services for families raising children with developmental disabilities and building inclusive playgrounds and parks for children of all ages and abilities. Through these programmes, the foundation strives to accomplish its key mission — to help build an inclusive society open to people with special needs.
Via the ‘Every Child Deserves a Family’ programme, Naked Heart tries to put an end to the practice still existing in Russia of abandoning children with developmental peculiarities as state wards. To this date, the foundation has financed multiple projects initiated by dozens of Russian organizations to help children and adults with physical, mental and sensor disabilities, and has provided financing to the Family Support Center and Early Intervention Centers, as well as organizing summer integration camps for children and teenagers with autism. The foundation has been implementing a unique interregional project aimed at training school and preschool teachers to work with children with autism spectrum disorder. Thanks to this work, hundreds of children, who were previously treated as having learning disabilities, now have access to education and have started to socialize.
Moreover, starting from 2012, the foundation has been holding an annual international forum ‘Every Child Deserves a Family’. This is a one-of-a-kind communication platform for leading Russian and foreign child development experts, where representatives from different regions of Russia share their opinions and experience and help develop a professional community in Russia.
Since it was established, the foundation has financed over 200 inclusive playground facilities, as part of the ‘Play with Purpose’ programme. These are for children of all ages and abilities, including playgrounds established for ophanages and children's hospitals, as well as oncology and rehabilitation centres. The geographical territory of playgrounds and parks created by the foundation covers over 140 cities — from Kaliningrad to Sovetskaya Gavan. And each year there are even more to come!