Czech Bretheren

ORGANISATION Diakonie of the Church of Brethren

ADDRESS Soukenicka 15,
110 00 Praha 1,
Czech Republic

TELEPHONE 00 420 222 585 733

CONTACT PERSON/S Ing. Pavel Průša, (Koněvova 24, 130 00 Praha 3.)

HISTORY
Diakony of the Church of Brethren was established by the Church of Brethren and is closely bound to it. It continues the social work of the Church of Brethren (former Free Reformed Church) that was very broad and in the middle of the last century had to be stopped. Diakony of the Church of Brethren as it is known today was founded on April 7, 1992. It is an organizational unit of the Church of Brethren and performs services with a Christian approach mostly in social areas.

PRESENT ACTIVITY

Our organisation has eleven branches established by local congregations of our church. These branches in cooperation local churches, perform Christian social help for needy people either within the church congregation or in the town or region.
Our specific activities:
• We run a day centre for children with autism and combined handicap, sheltered housing for mentally handicapped and Sunflower Centre (support for independence for persons with a physical or combined handicap ).
• We organise camps for handicapped children, handicapped adults, seniors and problematic youth.
• Using volunteers, we provide an assistance service for disabled clients and care and pastoral service for seniors. Voluntary work with seniors is an integral part of nearly every local congregation of our church.
• At the present time we have built two houses for social care. In Prague it is called House Bethesda and the second one is Senior Citizen Housing in Hradek nad Olsi. We are building Centre Noemi in Litvinov (it will contain several projects – maternity centre, sheltered workshop, work with street children, advisory for Roma citizens, …)
• We also have educational seminars for social workers.
• We organise humanitarian and charitative help in the Czech republic and abroad. In this activity we are mainly focused on Ukraine.
• In the scope of our activity we cooperate with other providers of Christian social services and we are making every effort to effectively coordinate our work and to form an appropriate legislative environment for social work.

FUTURE PLANS

We want to develop our diaconal social work, particularly within the local churches of the Church of Brethren.