On February 1, 2001, the editorial board of the Religious Information Service of Ukraine began its work.
RISU was founded to inform the world and Ukraine about religious life in our country on a non-confessional basis. In the beginning, the emphasis was on the foreign reader, especially journalists, to provide them unbiased information in accessible language, in particular, before the visit of Pope John Paul II to Ukraine. Therefore, at first, RISU "spoke" in English - the Ukrainian version appeared in October 2001, and then came the Russian.
And during these 20 years, foreign foundations interested in such objective, non-confessional information about different Churches and religious organizations in Ukraine, the religious palette of the country, the rich Ukrainian sacred culture, nuances of our interfaith relations, etc., supported our activities, and we are incredibly grateful to them.
However, we celebrate our considerable anniversary without any funding for the editorial office's work or the development of a new site, which we launched in the summer of 2020.
By the 20th anniversary, the RISU editorial board has set itself the great goal of creating a stabilization fund that would allow it to operate in the absence of grants or other permanent funding. We remind you that RISU operates thanks to grants and donations. None of the Churches or religious organizations finances us - some specific individuals or institutions support it.
In July 2020, we started fundraising on our website, and as of February 1, we collected UAH 10,210. Our director gathered another 37 thousand UAH in May-June 2020 among Facebook friends.
Our primary goal is to cover the debt to the site's developer (14 thousand dollars) - this must be done by April 2021. We also need to raise funds for the editorial board's daily activities, fees and development in general (more than 50 thousand dollars a year).
Therefore, we will be grateful for each and every donation, sharing information about our needs and attracting more readers and patrons.
We believe that we have thousands and thousands of friends and our daily readers (now it is an average of 5-9 thousand daily)!