February 27, 2023

Creating the Extraordinary for Czech and Ukrainian Families

In the middle of her presentation, Helena Bartošová clicks on a video in which two blond toddlers no more than three years old are rocking out to a bassoon and clarinet quartet in front of a church altar.

“Some of them are like little veelas,” she says, laughing, her eyes crinkling with joy, referencing the fairy creature from Slavic folklore that has the power to entrance through their dancing.

Helena, an Academy for Women Entrepreneurs (AWE) ExchangeAlumni and a Czech language teacher, was in the middle of a series of concerts and events to help Ukrainian refugees in the Czech Republic. She came up with the idea for Filharmoniště - which is a neologism in Czech that is an amalgamation of Philharmonic and Playground in Czech (Filharmonie+hřiště), in 2018 when she and her co-founder, Vanda Kofroňová, a fellow AWE ExchangeAlumni, television editor, and reporter, were walking around Prague with their newborns in strollers and realized they were missing an aspect of their lives.

“We had little babies and we really needed the cultural events we had earlier,” Helena says. “We figured out that in Britain and Germany it’s quite common to have classical music concerts for babies, from zero up to two, three years [old], and parents, and we wanted it, too. So we said, ‘Okay, let’s bring it to the Czech Republic.’”

Helena adds that when she had been at the hospital, she had met someone from the National Theater Orchestra, which helped bring the first concert into fruition.

Photo Courtesy: Miroslav Lepeška

Five years later, Filharmoniště, which sits somewhere between a social enterprise and an arts non-profit, has regular seasons of concerts for parents and children, in part thanks to the even bigger kickstart in 2021 of the arrival of the AWE program in the Czech Republic. Helena says she gained a lot of confidence from AWE, but the three-month course provided at the U.S. Embassy in Prague also taught her how to build up a network to support businesses and gave her an even larger built-in network from other AWE alumni, the AWE mentors, and now the broader ExchangeAlumni network. It also helped that Filharmoniště won the top prize at the end of the program.

“It really kicked us,” Helena says. “We were thinking, let’s stop, don’t think about it. This first prize said okay, it’s really worth working on it more, pushing on it more, to spread it in the world, to spread it in the media. We thought that it’s worth doing it.”

But that wasn’t the only prize that Helena and Vanda won. Their work also garnered an Embassy Alumni Rapid Response grant to help Ukrainian women and children now in the Czech Republic following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, February 24, 2021. Filharmoniště’s response has been a series of free concerts with language workshops for Ukrainians and networking between Ukrainian and Czech parents to help with integration, all in partnership with the Czech NGOs Diakonie and Center for Integration of Foreigners.

Helena knows that the refugees are mainly focused on survival, but she wanted to give them something special, something “extraordinary,” just as has been the mission all along for her organization.

“We really wanted our event to have the opportunity to relax a little bit, to have something extraordinary and to be able to afford it,” she says. “‘Cause they are not thinking of classical music or anything. Because they need to survive. Just help them more in those things that they really need and they need to be integrated in the Czech Republic. And keep going and help them. Our ambition is that they can stay after the concert and they can chat, meet. They can have a little network.”

They’ve hosted three Ukrainian aid events so far this year.

Parents come with blankets, snacks, and drinks. The children lay around, dance, sing, and sometimes get to touch the instruments, making the concerts very unlike any normally associated with classical music.

These moments of joy and culture bring together Czech and Ukrainian families, little breaks in the day where Helena says music can give energy outside of normal routines. The events may be casual in appearance, but overall, Helena works to make the concerts extraordinary occasions.