"Communities in Belarus are in a real state," explains Mrs Brunner. "People know they are Jewish but they don't know what it means.
"They lack support. In all the communities I visited, I found people meeting in pokey basements, not knowing how to be Jewish.
"I figured it couldn't be that difficult to help them become Jewish again."
The former company director first began visiting Belarus in 2008. She saw a need for Jewish education within the Belarus community and realised it could also be an opportunity to fill a gap at Finchley Reform, where young adults were disappearing from shul activities at the age of 18 as they had no further leadership opportunities.
So in 2010 she travelled to Polotsk with her daughter Samantha and six other madrichim [student teachers]to run a summer camp for the children of the community - and the Youth 4 Youth project was born.
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According to Mrs Brunner, there are an estimated 50,000 Jews in Belarus. So far, through her charity The Together Plan, she has set up annual summer camps in Polotsk, where there is a community of 300, and Bobruisk, where numbers reach 500.
Daughter Samantha Brunner, 25, was volunteer number one in a network that now numbers 117 youth leaders, both British and Belarusian. Having spent her teen years as a madricha in the Finchley Reform youth team, she was surprised by the inexperience of the Belarusian camp leaders at her first camp session.
She says: "There was zero sense of hadracha [leadership]. One student teacher smoked in the middle of a programme."
At the end of the first day, the British madrichim gave their Belarusian counterparts a "long list of everything that needed to be improved and they said 'thank you so much'".
The new leaders learned quickly and this year they are running the Polotsk summer camp without any help.
Ms Brunner remembers the poverty of the children as one of the first things that struck her, and recalls how excited they were to receive gift bags filled with everyday items, such as toothpaste.
"I have never seen the look of appreciation so much - that was something that resonated with me," she says.
Despite their cultural differences and the language barrier, Ms Brunner says that once the ice was broken with the Belarusian madrichim, they were laughing and joking within minutes.She now counts several of them among her closest friends.
It costs around £7,000 to run one of the camps. The British leaders are all volunteers and even pay for their own flights, while Finchley Reform takes donations throughout the year to pay for their visas. The young leaders run fundraising events throughout the rest of the year to help cover costs. An annual event sees the volunteers walk the length of an entire Tube line in fancy dress.
Redressing the mentality in Belarus towards donors was one of the main issues that Mrs Brunner had to contend with when setting up her charity The Together Plan.
"The mentality is that wealthy western donors give money and then they have to do what they are told," she says. But that was not the approach the mother of three was interested in.
"I wanted to help communities to build themselves."
The camps became a starting point for teaching the community about Judaism. The first one in Polotsk had Shabbat as the theme and, in subsequent years, the children and madrichim learned about festivals through games, songs and activities.
The Belarusian students then teach their communities about what they have learnt.
A recent agreement with UK-based National Open College Network means that both British and Belarusian madrichim are now awarded a college certificate if they complete their leadership training.
According to Vlad Zaiko, Belarusian rosh [leader] of the Bobruisk camp, "a lot of things have changed. We didn't know what a community should be before we met everyone at The Together Plan. There's never been anything like the camp in Bobruisk before. Now we meet every Sunday and we have a community centre."
He adds: "Before, we felt like we were alone. But now it is different."
In August, the Bobruisk camp will welcome 70 children, a week after the Polotsk madrichim have run their camp. The latter will travel to Bobruisk to lend a hand.
Meanwhile, another scheme developed by The Together Plan sees bar- and batmitzvah students in the UK paired with a Belarus "buddy". The pair write to each other and the British twin fundraises to help pay for learning resources and a kiddush for their Belarusian counterpart.
It is through Mrs Brunner's charity that Polotsk community leader Rina Freidinzon was able to become a Hebrew teacher. She now teaches in the Polotsk cheder.
"It wasn't a community before," she says. "Since we have worked with The Together Plan, we have grown up and achieved great things. Now we have a lot of projects and we are thinking of more and more."
Tikkun olam [healing the world] is this year's summer camp theme, but judging from the enthusiasm and proactivity of these community leaders, they will not have too much to learn. As 21-year-old Ms Freidinzon puts it: "This is only the beginning."
