The Raymond Nicolet Trust was founded in December 2018 as a Registered Incorporated Organisation by Christine Fort-Hilcenko, Florence Bachelard-Bakal, and Tony Taylor.
At the Raymond Nicolet Trust, we believe education should be a gift for everyone at any age. The Trust was initiated with the dream of sharing the gift of education with the children of Serbia.
who was Raymond Nicolet
The charity chose the name Raymond Nicolet who was the godfather of Christine’s son, Lucas. It is in his memory that the trust was born.
Raymond Nicolet was a former deputy Editor in Chief of the French daily newspaper L’Est Républicain. A humanist, tolerant and free-thinking individual, he enlisted at the age of 17 in the French Resistance to the occupier in an intelligence network for the Allied Forces, which led him to be decorated after the war by the French, British and Belgian authorities.
His career brought him to travel and witness many inequalities in the world against which he fought with ardor. He focused mainly on helping disadvantaged children and orphans wherever he could.
He died in 2017, a year before Christine went to Serbia for the first time when the charity was formed.
How it started
In April 2018, Christine was invited as a guest speaker to a conference on education in Subotica, Serbia. She was distressed by the reality of the situation of the support to schools compared to the standards she experienced throughout her lifetime in the rest of Europe. Following her visit, she decided in December 2018 to create a charity “The Raymond Nicolet Trust” with two friends, Florence Bachelard-Bakal and Tony Taylor to support childhood and education in Serbia.
Christine quickly set up the website and all legal requirements. She organized a team of journalists, marketing consultants, teachers, and scientists from the University of Cambridge in the UK, but also in France, Serbia, Canada, Bulgaria and Greece with a total of more than 50 people involved to date.
The charity also has famous Raymond Nicolet Trust patrons including Serbian footballers Nemanja Matic and Aleksandar Mitrovic, Serbian violinist Nemanja Radulovic, Serbian basketball player Nikola Jokic and Chemistry Nobel Prize winner Professor Sir John Ernest Walker.
OUR MISSION
The RNT is determined to help children in Serbia through financial and material assistance to the schools but also through global awareness of the current situation of the education system in Serbia. Co-founder Christine's ambition is for the charity to grow with the help of ambassadors globally to progressively support more and more schools in Serbia until the children there will benefit from the same opportunities in life as the ones on the rest of the old continent.