10,000 Laughs is very proud this year to partner with the Protez Foundation. What do they do? In the simplest terms, they provide prosthetics to Ukrainian soldiers and civilians. That doesn’t quite do their work justice, so we’ll let them describe it:

”We started Protez Foundation last year, right after Russia invaded Ukraine, with one big mission: to get amputee soldiers back on their feet – literally! We fly them from Ukraine to Minnesota, hook them up with top-notch prosthetics, state of the art rehab, therapy, food, and a whole lot of love from the Ukrainian community in Minnesota. It’s like a 3-4 week crash course in getting their lives back.

Currently in Ukraine there are more than 60,000 people in need of prosthetics because of the war. But there is a severe shortage of clinics and specialists in this very niche medical field. We are scaling our mission: opened two clinics in Ukraine and launched the Protez Academy to train Ukrainian specialists to make prosthetics faster and better, so more people can get back to living full lives sooner.

We've helped 300+ Ukrainians so far, including 3 kiddos (they now live in Minnesota!), and delivered over 500 prosthetic devices. Some soldiers even returned to the front lines with their new gear. Talk about commitment!

We’re the largest private center in the world (outside Ukraine) doing this for Ukrainians, and we run lean – only 8% goes to admin costs! To save on operational costs, we heavily rely on volunteers and partners and we love them for it!

But here’s where we need help: on average it costs about $21,000 per soldier for everything. And we’ve got a mountain of applications, but more and more people in Ukraine need prosthetics as you are reading this text.

P.S. We’ve gotten zero dollars from any government so far, so everything’s powered by generous folks like you! If you want to pitch in or volunteer, please contact Andrey Madan at andrey@protezfoundation.com.

During 10,000 Laughs we’ll be collecting donations to Protez along with our ticketing - and via the donation page on their website. Protez does amazing work here in the Twin Cities and we’re proud to support them.