Macedonian pharmaceutical company Alkaloid organized a picnic for their employees and raised about EUR 17,000 (MKD 1,050,000) for the association for rare diseases Life with Challenges.

The annual picnic is an 8-year-old tradition which brings together Alkaloid’s employees and their families and friends in order to raise funds for a good cause.

This year it was decided that the picnic would support the Life with Challenges (Живот со предизвици), citizens association for rare diseases. The association was founded in 2009 and brings together parents of children and adult patients who live with rare diseases. About 3,000 people attended this latest picnic. 

Vesna Aleksovska, President of Life with Challenges said that this donation will help the association further its efforts in helping and supporting some 120,000 people in Macedonia who are affected by a rare disease, through the initiative Helpline (Линија за помош) which has been running on an informal basis for the past three years. Following the examples of European countries, as well as neighboring Croatia and Serbia, the association will use Alkaloid’s donation to create a more formal approach to this initiative:

“We plan to introduce a more organized approach to Helpline in order to help people with rare diseases in our country. First of all, this means providing them with  prompt, accurate and appropriate information, and then helping them use such information to enforce their healthcare and social rights. Having a rare disease means facing fear, embracing hope and fighting for the future. Every one of us deserves to be a part of the society and not just a patient. When the community supports us it makes our work much easier.”, said Ms Aleksovska.

Apart from previous successes at their picnics, the company’s employees also showed great solidarity when they raised EUR 20,000 for the treatment of their colleagues’ son in 2016.