The 2023 Russian Federation National Award for outstanding achievements in charity activity has been awarded to Nikolai Slabzhanin.
Nikolai Slabzhanin was born on December 29, 1968, in Novosibirsk. Executive Director of the Russian Committee of SOS Children’s Villages interregional public charity organisation.
Mr Slabzhanin graduated from the Novosibirsk Institute of Electrical Engineering. During his studies, he began working at the Institute of Business Psychology consulting firm. As a volunteer, he was involved in youth projects since 1994, was the founder and vice president of the Siberian Centre for Supporting Public Initiatives which supported NGO projects in 12 Siberian regions. He also organised the first grant competitions for NGOs, created resource centres, sparked the development of the volunteer movement, including the efforts to involve up to 500,000 volunteers in the Spring Week of Kindness, and also initiated the creation of ten regional volunteer centres by writing a book, Volunteers in Your Organisation.
Mr Slabzhanin worked as an international civil society development specialist at the UN mission in Central Asia. He held over 300 trainings and seminars in Russia and abroad.
In 2006, Mr Slabzhanin became the first Executive Director of the Viktoria Charity Foundation, where he was responsible for charity programmes to support orphans in over 40 regions of Russia.
Since 2008, Mr Slabzhanin has been Executive Director of the Russian Committee of SOS Children’s Villages. The organisation has implemented a social orphanhood prevention programme, which helped keep over 30,000 children in their birth families, ensuring their right to live and be raised in a family.
SOS Children’s Villages became a prototype for a number of other projects to prevent social orphanhood in Russia.
When the special military operation was launched, Nikolai Slabzhanin implemented a strategy to fund the organisation entirely from domestic sources. He began to use the power of SOS villages to organise recreation and rehabilitation for children from the new regions of the Russian Federation. In 2023, 570 million rubles were collected, of which 83 percent were contributions from philanthropists and individuals.
Main areas of the current activities:
- implementing charitable programmes aimed at protecting a child’s right to live and be raised in a family, primarily birth family, and helping families overcome a crisis situation;
- involving people in transparent, effective charity;
- developing new tools of activity to collect charitable donations, such as regular monthly cash donations from private mass donors, which allowed for the transition of the SOS Children’s Villages and the Russian legal entities it established to fully Russian financing;
- developing volunteerism and charitable initiatives in Russia and abroad.
Nikolai Slabzhanin is a member of the Public Council under the Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights.