A Ukrainian Humanitarian Worker’s Plea to Philanthropy: Don’t Forget Us

This Saturday, February 24, marks two years since the Russian invasion of Ukraine turned the world upside down. Here in Ukraine, everyone remembers exactly where they were when the news broke. I woke at 4 a.m. to the rumbling of distant explosions and news headlines announcing in big red letters that the invasion had begun.

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Within half an hour, my husband, daughter, and I had left our home in Kyiv and were on our way to the west of Ukraine, where we thought we’d be safer. After a week of constant air raid sirens, we relocated to Switzerland to keep our daughter, then 7, from harm.

But within three months, we were back, not because it was safer, but because I couldn’t stay away from my country. I had worked with humanitarian groups before, when Russia invaded the Donbas in 2015. I didn’t think I would do it again. But that changed when an opportunity arose with an international aid group, IsraAID, to support displaced people across Ukraine. The work gave me a new purpose and the resilience to keep going.

I’ve told the above story dozens of times. But while everyone wants to hear about the invasion and the start of the war, fewer people are interested in stories of daily life two years on.

Here’s one story that sticks with me: Several months ago, I met a teenage girl outside one of the child-friendly locations where we provide activities for kids. This one was located at a school. When I joked with the girl that my child wouldn’t want to spend her free time at a school, she told me she hadn’t set foot in a classroom for three years. Between the pandemic and the war, this was the only place she could be with her peers to do what teenage girls are supposed to do: gossip and comment on one another’s new haircuts. She ran back inside with a smile and a wave.

It’s amazing how such small things — a place to be together and experience something that feels like normal life — can help people stay strong amid the unthinkable.

IsraAID

The immediate outpouring of support and aid from around the world in 2022 still enables my work today. Last year, as we marked one year of war, we felt the world’s eyes and hearts were still with us. But today, as we reach a new grim milestone, many humanitarian organizations are facing growing budget gaps. New crises are at the center of global discourse, particularly the Israel-Hamas war, and Ukraine has drifted from the headlines. The severity of the situation, however, hasn’t diminished. I wonder, could Ukraine become another neglected crisis?

Halt in Funding

Like many other nonprofits working in Ukraine, we saw the bulk of our funding in the first year of the war, with roughly 70 percent pledged in the first four months. Our experience is typical of groups working here. Come Back Alive, one of the largest Ukraine-based nonprofits, received nearly half of all foreign donations within the first three months of the war. Candid, which tracks publicly announced grants and pledges for Ukraine aid, reported that 98 percent of grants were given in 2022 and only 2 percent in 2023. While this may represent a lag in reporting of grants, Candid confirmed that the total percentage is unlikely to change significantly.

In all, just 66 percent of funding needs for Ukraine were met last year, down from 87 percent in 2022, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The U.N. reduced its 2024 funding appeal for Ukraine, not because needs have lessened, but because other crises around the world also demand attention.

The decrease in government support has huge implications for philanthropy. As U.N. agencies face funding shortfalls, they need to prioritize heavily populated urban areas, leaving smaller nonprofits to meet the needs of more remote, vulnerable communities at a time when philanthropic dollars have slowed to a trickle.

For the last two years, we’ve partnered with dozens of local nonprofits and government officials to build a network of support for displaced people and Ukrainian refugees. This includes meeting basic needs, such as restoring access to safe water in the port city of Mykolaiv and surrounding villages after a Russian attack cut off the water supply. In other cases, we’ve focused on mental health, training psychologists to work in Ukrainian hospitals, or creating child-friendly places where displaced children such as the teenage girl I met can have a sense of normalcy and routine.

Through collaboration and consistency, we’ve built a trusted support system for those we serve. But there is no guarantee we can sustain this level of aid, even as the need grows.

Growing Need

Roughly 4 million Ukrainians are still internally displaced, with 14.6 million, or 40 percent of the population, in need of urgent humanitarian assistance. Dire economic conditions are taking a physical and emotional toll on civilians as people who once had the resources to help one another find that they too need help.

This phenomenon is not unique to Ukraine. Humanitarian aid workers know that the immediate aftermath of every disaster brings the strongest support and funds. And yet, this is not how emergencies develop.

As with all protracted emergencies, the Ukraine crisis is composed of daily crises within the wider context of the war. As fighting continues, new civilian emergencies emerge every day. More intense attacks on civilians and infrastructure have left more people without access to water or shelter. Fighting continues to impede aid delivery to the most affected regions, and the type of interventions necessary are more long-term and complex. It’s not just food and shipments of blankets, but addressing the mental effects on children and adults who endure constant shelling.

Even if the fighting ended today, the country would face a years-long recovery. Unfortunately, global interest rarely aligns with need. The longer an emergency goes on, the further it is from the headlines and from donors. With the Ukraine crisis’s enormous scale and global implications, it received more attention and for longer than most disasters, and still, fatigue eventually set in.

Donors who want to make a difference need to reexamine how they support communities in protracted crisis. The road to recovery is long, and the longer a crisis lasts, the more important it is that philanthropy does not look away and directs support where it’s needed.

Here in Ukraine, we don’t have the luxury of media fatigue. I’ve watched my team work nonstop through blackouts, shelling, and sleepless nights in shelters and never lose sight of why we do what we do. We have no choice but to endure, and we ask the philanthropic world to stand and endure with us.