The organisation hoped to raise awareness of the condition through a positive role model such as Miss Bondarenko (23), who was achieving her goals while living with epilepsy, field officer Lynne Stewart said.
"For Sammy to be achieving at this level, despite all the challenges, it is pretty incredible really," Ms Stewart said.
Diagnosed with epilepsy at the age of 4, Miss Bondarenko never let anything stop her. She became involved in cross-country skiing in 1999 and "got straight into racing".
Despite having no coach and being funded entirely by her family, she reached the top of the sport in New Zealand and held her title for the past seven years.
She has a challenging type of epilepsy called complex partial seizures. This presented itself as a behaviour people thought she should be able to control.
Despite being on medication, her seizures were uncontrolled and could occur up to 20 times a day.
Usually, they lasted about 10 seconds and varied between "a bit of blankness to completely blacking out", she said.
They felt like a "massive electric shock" and drained her energy.
She viewed them as "something you deal with", not something that could hold her back; and she wanted others not to think of the condition as a challenge.
One of the side effects of her medication was fatigue, which, added to her energy-depleting seizures, did not help her training. She trained for about three hours a day.
However, Miss Bondarenko believed being an athlete was the best thing for her.
"If you're not doing anything, you feel like you are going to bounce off the walls."
Today, she will travel to Canada to race, after which she hopes to qualify for the Vancouver Winter Olympics in 2010.
To help her on her way, Epilepsy Otago made a $500 donation to her Olympic bid and would continue to raise funds for her where possible.
As part of this fundraising, the organisation planned to produce a calendar product featuring photographs of Miss Bondarenko which would be sold around the country.
"The message we want to get out there is that epileptics are able to do anything," Ms Stewart said.
Between 1% and 2% of New Zealand's population was thought to have epilepsy yet it still had "a lot of stigma about it", and was often misunderstood, she said.
Ms Stewart believed it often came down to people fearing they did not know what to do if someone had an epileptic fit.
