Lek Games and Silly Olympics at the end of the holidays

The holidays are over, and having one more nice memory of them is a good reason to enjoy the first few days of the new school year; for this very reason, every child should have the opportunity to enjoy relaxing, creative and interesting holidays. The Slovenian Friends of Youth Association and Lek Pharmaceuticals have worked together to put on the A Wink at the Sun campaign for 11 years, which has to date enabled 7,000 children to go on holiday who would otherwise not have been able to have any holiday adventures; this year that figure rose by another 700 children.

Lek Pharmaceuticals, which has been a partner in the A Wink at the Sun charity campaign from the very beginning, made sure that the end of the holidays as fun and unforgettable as possible for the Maribor children; they held the annual Lek Games at the Slovenian Friends of Youth Association’s Silly Olympics, together with the popular Kolenc Family Theater, whose show complemented the all-day sporting events. A press conference was held on the occasion at which they reported on the current status of the A Wink at the Sun charity campaign and presented the programs for the new school year which are being prepared by the Slovenian Friends of Youth Association and the Maribor Friends of Youth Association.

“For 11 years with the ‘A Wink at the Sun – making holidays possible for all children’ campaign we have been encouraging good people to contribute according to their means to help children go on holidays who would otherwise have to stay at home, left to their own devices and the streets, due to the social circumstances of their families. The campaign has been extremely well received by Slovenian citizens as individuals and as company representatives even in this year’s crisis conditions. While in past years we have relied primarily on legal entities, this year with the help of the newspapers Delo and Večer we also reached 150,000 families throughout Slovenia and their response was larger than we had expected. This year’s campaign got off to a great start with the charity concert by the Parliamentary Dixie Band, sponsored by Barbara Miklič Türk, and the group also donated the proceeds from their new CD to the campaign,” said Franc Hočevar, President of the SFYA.

One of the strategic objectives of the Slovenian Friends of Youth Association is to constantly strive to provide equal opportunities for including all children – including those from poor families – in organized leisure-time activities and to continuously encourage all good-hearted people to help eliminate the social exclusion of children. In doing so they essentially fulfill the provisions of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which charges its signatories to ensure that all children are provided with the right to appropriate enjoyment of leisure time, and to holidays intended for rest and relaxation as well as improving their health. Every year around twenty thousand children attend “nature schools” with the Slovenian Friends of Youth Association. The holidays are held at various locations in the Friends of Youth Association’s 15 modern equipped holiday homes by the sea and in the mountains.

“During these times when we are seeing a lot of pressures on families due to the economic and financial situation at home and abroad, it is all the more important that we do everything we can to ease those pressures. The majority of us went happily on holidays and we are trying to make that experience available to the largest possible number of children in Slovenia. This has been our objective from the beginning, since we began working with the Friends of Youth Association on this campaign, and we are very pleased that our joint efforts have made it possible to brighten the holidays of 7,000 children,” said Katarina Klemenc Dinjaški, Head of Corporate Communications at Lek.