Non profit
Music for charity
The Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity hit the 9 million euro mark during this year's fundraiser
di Staff
Raising 9 million euros in one day is a feat few Poles can claim to have achieved. But Jerzy Owsiak is not just any old person, he is the charismatic founder of Poland’s biggest one-day charity fundraiser, the Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity, which on January 9 raised 37 million zloty (just over 9 million euros) for children with kidney disease.
The event is held every year and will go on holding auctions and fundraising events until February. This year 800 concerts were performed involving 1300 artists and 120 thousand volunteers. “It‘s a day like today when we show that we are a community of Poles – that we are united,” said Owsiak during the event’s grand finale. Much of the money was raised via auction, with celebrities offering services and gadgets in return for donations.
Poland’s president, Bronislaw Komorowski, and his wife offered places in the VIP box at the National Stadium in Warsaw for the opening match of the Euro 2012 football championship. Poland’s navy auctioned trips in a submarine and the Poznan air base offered a ride in their F-16 training simulator. The health minister Ewa Kopacz pledged that the government would donate extra funding for the earlier diagnosis of children suffering from cancer, a programme initiated by the charity ’orchestra’.
On Sunday evening the traditional “heaven‘s light” fireworks lit up the sky above the Palace of Culture and Science in the centre of Warsaw as a finale to events which saw 120,000 volunteers up and down the country out with collecting tins in what has become a feature in January in Poland since the charity began in 1992.
Orchestra plays worldwide
Events were not only confined to Poland. For the first time, the charity saw a fund raising drive in Spain, where money was collected in Madrid, the Canary Islands and in Palma de Rio near Cordoba, in partnership with the Spanish Red Cross.
In the USA, the largest event was in Chicago, where the Copernicus Centre organised exhibitions to raise money for the charity and local shops put collection tins by the checkout counter.
Fund raisers also took place in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Britain, France, Belgium, Austria, Greece, Ireland, Canada, Germany, Iceland, Sweden, and even Poland’s Antarctic station Arctowski.
