💙Finding Hope In One Another💛

This is United Ukraine co-founder Adam with your mid-week update on where your donations have helped the most. Since our last update, we’ve distributed an additional $4,109.05 to community leaders and families inside Ukraine. Our model has always been unique because it relies so heavily on allowing Ukrainians to tell us where help is needed, and then reacting to those reported conditions on the ground. Ukrainians are strong and they are proud; as long as they have sufficient resources no one can help them better than they can help themselves. We work to get them those resources, and watch as incredible results simply flow in. Our partners deliver physical goods but they also deliver hope. Part of what makes the narod, the actual people, so sure of victory is their ability to hang together and work for each other. Your donations do more than just keep people fed; they keep morale high. And in a war, the will to keep going is everything.

This week, our partners’ efforts included deliveries of food and diapers in Kharkiv Oblast, and literal truckloads of canned goods delivered to people in need from Sergiy’s distribution center in Ivano-Frankovsk.

Your donations also delivered multiple fully stocked medical kits to hospitals and clinics near the front-line city of Nikolaev, and personalized deliveries of staples to individual citizens in the Zaporizhzhia region who have been cut off from normal transportation routes due to heavy shelling. Elderly residents often don’t have formal driver’s licenses in this area of Ukraine and rely on local marketplaces to consistently supply items like cooking oil. In the fifth month of the conflict, our partners understand the importance of these household basics to their way of life. These deliveries help regular citizens live the life they want to live, keep them safely in their villages away from direct, and prevent them from joining the more than 12 million Ukrainians who have already been displaced by the Russian invasion.

We also have another United Ukraine charity baby, Ervin, born in safety after your donations helped transport his parents from Mariupol. And our very first charity baby, Avital, is growing up fast over the border. Now at three months hold, her mom Nastya reports that she’s a “very serious person.” She’s definitely already learned how to show us her skeptical face.

Of course, that’s not all. United Ukraine continues to make direct distributions to individual families who need immediate support during difficult times. More than half of all Ukrainian businesses have shuttered since the start of the invasion, and the Ukrainian economy is projected to contract by 45% this year. That kind of economic collapse is essentially unfathomable in the American experience. For comparison, in 1932, the worst year of the Great Depression, the US economy shrunk by 13%. Even during the worst of the Covid pandemic, the US economy shrunk less than half as quickly: at an annualized rate of 19%.

That means conditions on the ground are actually doubly extreme for displaced families. Not only do they have to leave everything behind, a historically unforgiving economic climate awaits them when they try to establish a new life. In practice, that means many families find themselves reduced by circumstance to desperate conditions. Often when so many things have gone wrong so quickly, all they really need is just a few things to go their way.

For example, Elena’s family (Sharik the dog included) fled from now occupied Kherson but were unable to find housing nearby. When they got in contact with us, they’d been living in a basement for over a month. Your donations helped get them to western Ukraine, where they made contact with family friends and now have access to proper lodging.

Unfortunately, their living situation is far from unique. Tatiyana grew up in Nikolaev but moved to Kharkiv for college. Last fall, she started her freshman year at Simon Kuznets National Economic University in Kharkiv: a college named after a Nobel-Prize winning Columbia University economist who largely helped steer the American economy during World War II. She never got to finish the school year, as her dormitory was destroyed in the first weeks of the war. Completely cut off from her family, she spent more than two months living in a cellar lit with only a single bulb and eating anything she could find. By the time we spoke with her, she just wanted to go back home. Any teenager in her situation would want the same. Your donations helped reunite Tatiyana with her family, and they are all now staying near Odessa.

As always, these stories and photos are just a sampling of the work we’ve done. Your donations go a LONG way in this part of the world. Farther than you think. The flipside of widespread economic collapse, is that every dollar counts to the people we talk to. Your donations fund projects all over the country and make big impacts on people’s lives. If you like what you see, here’s how you can help keep this project going:

Via Debit, Credit, or Paypal:  At this link
Via Venmo: @UnitedUkraine (under the business tab)
Our Website: http://www.united-ukraine.org

And we accept checks via mail at:
225 Bright Poppy
Irvine, CA 92618

We’ll be back next week with even more examples of who you’ve helped and the projects you’ve funded. Unfortunately, no one knows when this conflict will end. We can’t control the course of the war itself, but we can all do our part to ameliorate its impact on people who never asked for it. Thank you for being part of the solution to the problems of this world. I know that your support is something that I’ll never forget.

As always, with love,

Adam