- Social projects
- Kazakhstan
- 2026
“Berekeli Dastarkhan”: an interactive banner, cards and a recipe book for the final meeting of the Omirlik Maqsat programme
Omirlik Maqsat is a two-year programme by the Eurasia Foundation of Central Asia, supported by the Citi Foundation, aimed at preventing hidden homelessness among women with disabilities and parents of children with special needs in Kazakhstan. For the programme's final conference, we came up with and produced three connected pieces: an interactive banner, cards and a recipe book. Together they turned the conference into a shared table where every guest brings something of their own and takes home a piece of someone else's home.
Starting point
Hidden homelessness is hard to see from the outside: a person may have a job but no stable home of their own. The programme helped participants strengthen their financial independence, get legal advice on housing and improve their living conditions. We needed to tell this story so that housing and the right to a home of one's own sounded clear and human, while the donor, partners and press saw concrete results and the participants' stories.
What we learned about the audience
In Central Asia, the main symbol of home is the dastarkhan, the shared table. Food is a language of love, care and family memory. So we built all the materials for the meeting on one chain: hidden homelessness → home → dastarkhan.
Task
Prepare materials for the programme's final conference, attended by the foundation team, the donor, regional partner NGOs, ministry representatives and the media. Show the programme's results and talk about hidden homelessness with care and clarity.
Solution
- 01
An interactive 3×2 m banner. We drew a dastarkhan with empty dishes in the style of children's drawings. Guests were given markers and “set the table” themselves, drawing their family dishes on the plates. The programme's results are built right into the tableware.
- 02
“Otbasylyq retsept / Family recipe” cards. The front shows 20 drawings by children with special needs from an open-air painting session held by the EFCA team together with MamaPro; the back has lines to handwrite the recipe of a dish that means “home”. The cards were collected in a basket, and at the end of the evening everyone drew someone else's recipe and took it home.
- 03
A spiral-bound recipe book. Inside are the programme's results, the beneficiaries' stories and pages for your own recipes. The inside front cover holds an envelope for the card received at the meeting.
- 04
Everything in Kazakh and Russian, with Kazakh first. Editing of the foundation's texts, and illustrations inside in the style of children's naive painting.
Photographer: Iris Mambur
Figures
- Interactive banner3×2 m
- Cards with 20 children's drawings80
- Books of 64 pages80
What worked
- Guests did not just listen, they took part: by the end of the evening, the empty table on the banner was full.
- The foundation was left with strong visuals for the media and the donor report: the filled-in banner, the card exchange, books in hand.
- Merch people actually use: the spiral-bound book lies open in the kitchen.
Client testimonial
For us it was important that the final “Omirlik Maqsat” event did not just sum up the programme, but helped people see the real stories behind the numbers. The TELLER team proposed a very precise and warm concept that brought all the materials together around the image of the dastarkhan, a familiar symbol of home, care and togetherness. We especially liked that our guests became participants rather than spectators: the interactive banner gradually filled up with drawings, and the cards and recipe books let everyone keep a piece of the project as a keepsake. The result was meaningful, emotional and visually coherent all at once!
Team
- Katya LeymanHead of content
- Ekaterina LoganovaArt director
- Maksim FetisovContent strategist
- Danel KhojayevaEurasia Foundation of Central Asia
- Bayan NabiyevaEurasia Foundation of Central Asia
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