Dear Listmembers:

On July 18, 2004 our listserve turned five years young!!

I would like to thank all of the subscribers of the RussianOrphans listserve for their interest in helping Russian orphans.

In order to provide you with more and better organized information on what is happening in Russian orphanages and where there is still need we would like to change the format of this listserve to a news digest. The idea is to publish a compilation of news articles about orphans published in Russian media.

We hope that you will like this new source of information and will help us to distribute these issues to a larger audience. We have obtained permissions from Russian media companies to reproduce their information in our digest with the hope that this will help children and bring attention to the situation in individual orphanages. To facilitate assistance we will try to include contact information for every place that is mentioned and charities that work in that region.

Please feel free to send us your suggestions on how to improve the new digest and to share your experience in helping orphaned children. We also welcome volunteers particularly these with talents in media, publishing, fundraising, web design, editing, PR, etc.

Enjoy!

Mike Airumian
List Moderator
mike@airumian.com