How Flavio's supports children with heart defects

I moved out of my parents' house the day I turned 18. Where did I go? The largest city I knew, of course: Berlin. And quickly I was lost and alone in a city that was way too big for me.

And so in the late summer of 2019, now seven years ago, I joined a charity as a volunteer for a series of events. Stiftung Kinderherz was the one thing in Berlin I already knew. My mother and my grandma have supported it for about two decades, and as a child I helped out at a bunch of their events back home. My brother is involved as well. It's always been a family thing. 

If you've never heard of them: Stiftung KinderHerz is a German foundation for children with heart disease. Roughly one in 100 babies is born with a heart defect, which makes it the most common organ disease in newborns. Without treatment, 70 percent of these children would not survive, and more than a quarter of them need open-heart surgery.

What the foundation does is collect money and put it where it's needed. It works with almost 20 children's heart centres across Germany and is funding more than 30 projects right now. Some of it sounds like science fiction. In Hamburg, researchers are trying to build a heart chamber out of lab-grown living tissue for children born with only half a working heart. Another project is developing a biological pacemaker cable made from a child's own cells, so it can grow with them and spare them one operation after another. The goal behind all of it is simple: a child with a heart defect should get to live just as long and well as their healthy friends.

So I went and helped the children. That was the whole plan. I didn't go there to fix my own problems, I just wanted to be useful for a day. But that day I also met Max. He was volunteering too, and we got along right away. I had come to help, and I went home with a friend. 

We've been supporting the charity ever since - as much as we could. I've also run two races for them, in South-Africa and just recently the Berlin Marathon to collect donations. 

When Max and I started Flavio's together, it was obvious that the charity had to be in there somehow. So we decided on something simple: for every order, Flavio's donates €1 to Stiftung Kinderherz. That comes out of our profits, so of course our customers don't pay anything extra.

I know €1 doesn't sound like a lot. But it's on every order, and I'd rather do a small thing every time than a big thing once and then forget about it.

So if you order from us, you're part of this too. Thank you for that.

If you want to learn more about the charity, read on here: About Stiftung Kinderherz