How One Tiny, All-Volunteer Nonprofit Raised $57 Million for Ukraine

Kateryna Terekhova proudly shows off the new shelter she has created inside an abandoned schoolhouse in Zakarpattia, Ukraine, an area near the border with Slovakia, Romania, and Hungary. Over a video call, she points out the separate communal rooms for men, women, and families. The dozens of beds have brand new mattresses and linens. The bathrooms and showers are new, too. She loves the kitchen, which churns out three free meals a day for residents.

People lounge on beds; a girl is scrunched up on a bench in the dining room, staring at her phone. Outside it’s quiet in this rural area — a relatively safe reprieve for the families, individuals, and orphans who have fled the terror of the Russian invasion.

Terekhova fled here herself with her extended family from Kyiv in the opening days of the war and almost immediately began working on ways to help. Before the war, she consulted for restaurants, night clubs, and music and charity festivals. Organizing, feeding, and taking care of people come naturally.

As soon as she saw the schoolhouse, she knew it would make a perfect shelter. But it would require work — it had been empty for four years and had no plumbing or central heat.

She was part of a chat group with IT Troops, a group of Ukrainian technology workers and entrepreneurs who help get supplies to troops and fund humanitarian work. They put Terekhova in charge of their humanitarian efforts. The group had been in contact with Razom for Ukraine, a U.S.-based charity run by Ukrainian and Ukrainian American volunteers. Over a video call with some of Razom’s board members, Terekhova explained the project and provided expected costs for materials — she had already raised the funds to cover the discounted labor and ongoing expenses like food. Three days later she got a message from Razom congratulating her on her grant for $28,000, enough to cover all of the materials.

“It was absolutely shocking,” Terekhova says. “It was happening so fast. It was easy because we absolutely understand each other.”

Life and Death

Razom has made more than $3 million in grants to 98 small humanitarian efforts like this one since Russia invaded Ukraine in late February. The nonprofit’s deep ties to Ukraine have helped it connect with individual grassroots efforts that would likely be overlooked by big aid groups. The tiny, volunteer-led group, is now working on a massive scale and at a frantic pace. Every day its leaders and volunteers know that the work they do can mean the difference between life and death for someone in Ukraine.

For most of its eight-year history, Razom was a small, volunteer-run organization that raised about $150,000 a year to help promote a free and prosperous Ukraine. Before the war, it had about 4,000 donors. Money was so tight that last year the board deliberated whether the group could afford finger food for a fundraising event. But in the five months since the invasion, Razom has raised $57 million from more than 150,000 donors. It has already spent $38 million on humanitarian relief efforts. One of its major projects: buying supplies to assemble and ship tactical medical kits to Ukraine. The group has sent 62,000 kits so far — with more to come.

“Having more than 130,000 people turn to you and give you more than $50 million to work with to try to help people is not an easy thing to come to terms with,” says Maryna Prykhodko, who is in charge of social media and advocacy. At 27, she is the group’s youngest board member. “Some people would be paralyzed or debilitated with this huge weight on their shoulders. Every day you have to get yourself ready for the task at hand.”

Razom has outraised some large, well-established humanitarian aid groups. Project Hope, an international aid organization that is training medical professionals in Ukraine on trauma care, has received more than $21 million for the crisis since February.

“To raise $57 million for Ukraine and to be able to program such a large amount, that’s really fantastic,” says Project Hope CEO Rabih Torbay.

Courtesy of the communications office of the Ukrainian Catholic University

After the invasion, Razom’s board went from meeting twice a month to meeting every day. Teams of volunteers from around the world met every two hours in some cases.

While Russian troops were amassing on the border, Razom’s board decided that in the event of an invasion, it would focus on medical assistance. The group began buying supplies to create tactical first-aid kits that include important supplies like tourniquets.

Medical professionals volunteered to vet the supplies to make sure they were the right type and quality. Teams of volunteers put the kits together in a New Jersey warehouse. Volunteer software developers created a system to track the kits so the group knows where they are in the transit process and when they arrive at their destination in Ukraine. Corporations helped them find space on cargo planes for their supplies; a shipping company helped with logistics.

Shipments that might have taken months took just days. Lives were on the line for everything the group did. Slow shipments could be deadly, and volunteers were working around the clock.

“This is our country and our people,” says Dora Chomiak, Razom’s president. “We want to make sure that they’re alive and that there is a country to come back to and there’s a country for our children and our grandchildren.”

Razom collaborated with another group to train more than 500 doctors in how to treat multiple traumatic injuries, do triage, deal with blast injuries, and how to prepare for and respond to chemical warfare. The doctors are working in areas that see as many as 40 wounded civilians and soldiers a day. Razom’s approach is somewhat similar to Project Hope, which has more than 60 years of crisis experience. Torbay says training health professionals is one of the most impactful things that an aid organization can do.

“You can take medicines and medical supplies, but if the doctors and nurses are not trained to deliver those medicines and treat patients, then your impact will be minimal,” he says. “The multiplier effect that a trained health worker would have on treating patients constantly after you leave is amazing.”

Outpouring of Gifts

Handling the wave of donations has been as complicated as shipping supplies. When the group was founded, it tracked donations on an online spreadsheet. But it soon upgraded and put systems in place to process donations given online and through social-media channels. That made a big difference when Russia invaded and money poured in.

Maria Genkin, a board member who until this year mostly organized cultural events, took charge of the fundraising operation. She had worked in investment-banking technology at Goldman Sachs. In late February, the group started getting hundreds of emails a day asking how to give, about wire transfer information, and other questions — far more than one person could handle.

Luckily the group also got requests every day from people looking to volunteer. Genkin checked the backgrounds of some volunteers to create a trusted team to help potential donors, process incoming funds, and tackle the vast amount of data entry required to track donors. She ended up with a team of six or so volunteers, including some Ukrainian students from nearby New York University.

Nonetheless, the group is behind on thanking donors, Genkin says. “With that number of donors, it’s just not possible for us to acknowledge people as a donation came in, but we’re definitely going to.”

Razom has received some high-profile donations — Tipper Gore, Reed Hastings, co-founder of Netflix, and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey each gave $1 million. The New York Jets donated $100,000.

Some foundations also made grants to the group and loosened application and reporting requirements, Genkin says. “There was an incredible amount of goodwill and a desire for people on the foundations’ side to make it easier for us.”

Before this year, the RTW Charitable Foundation, the philanthropic arm of a biotech investment fund, had never supported any nonprofits focused on Ukraine. When the invasion started, Sarah Garwood, the foundation’s humanitarian grants manager, researched and considered 30 possible grantees. She was drawn to Razom, in part because it is run mostly by Ukrainian and Ukrainian American women. She knew they would have good local contacts. And the fact that the group’s response was health focused also was good fit.

Courtesy of Razom

Garwood wasn’t concerned that the group was run by volunteers because of the strong and varied backgrounds of the board members, who have expertise in business, technology, and international relations. She knew they were committed to the work.

“It’s extremely personal to a lot of these volunteers. These are people with deep ties, family, friends in Ukraine,” she says. “That really stood out to me.”

Garwood says she kept the conversation brief because Razom was working so hard to address the crisis. The foundation made a $100,000 grant with the expectation that the funds would support Razom’s emergency response. In three months, the group reported back that it was able to send more than 1,400 tactical medical backpacks with about 38,000 bandages, tourniquets, and wound dressings.

Now that the group has received so much funding and attention, the RTW Charitable Foundation is sending 10 to 15 volunteers to the New Jersey warehouse to help assemble medical kits.

In the Spotlight

While Razom’s exponential growth in donations is impressive, it is not unprecedented.

Many organizations experience a boom in funding when their issue suddenly rises to the fore. For example, when fires blazed in the Amazon three years ago, groups that work to preserve the rainforest saw a growth in interest and funding, which later dissipated when the issue fell off the media radar.

Although the funding and interest will inevitably wane on any issue that leaps to public attention, having such a large influx of money — particularly donations without restrictions on how they can be spent — can be a huge help for any organization, says Sonali Patel, a partner with Bridgespan.

Groups can use some of those funds to improve how they operate. They can hire staff — Razom, for example, created three staff positions for its board members, its first paid employees ever.

Nonprofits can also start to think more strategically and longer term, she says. And they can take some more risks than they might have been willing to make when money was scarce.

“We talk about the starvation cycle of nonprofits. They can’t afford to actually build the capacity internally to be able to be as resilient as they need to be over the long term,” says Patel. “These unrestricted gifts enable them to build the organization to do the work over the longer term.”

Chomiak, Razom’s president, says the organization is already planning for the future.

“Once the bombing stops, there is going to continue to be a lot of work to do. And we are very well set up to do it because we’re all about a prosperous Ukraine,” she says. “What can we do now to maximize our ability to efficiently accelerate the development of Ukraine six months from now?”

Local Contacts

Organizations like Razom can often be more effective than huge international aid organizations because of their personal contacts in Ukraine, Patel says.

“I’m excited that so much money is flowing to them. They are a local, on-the-ground organization,” she says. “It’s organizations like Razom that are thinking about the medium and long-term needs of individuals.”

Of the $25 billion philanthropy spends on refugee issues, only about 1.5 percent goes to local nonprofits, according to a Bridgespan estimate based on publicly available information. These groups and their longer-term perspective are increasingly important because refugees are displaced for longer periods of time, Patel says. Some never return to their countries. Larger international organizations are more likely to focus on immediate needs, but that short-term focus can ignore longer-term issues, she says. The big groups also lack local knowledge and contacts.

The personal ties of Razom’s board and its vast international network of volunteers, who also contribute funding ideas that filter up from their contacts, are part of what has made the group effective. This summer, Razom board member Maryna Prykhodko traveled to Kharkiv to evacuate her aunt and uncle and bring them to the United States. Each night, as missiles fell from the sky, they huddled in her aunt and uncle’s closet for safety.

“I saw the destruction with my own eyes. You crawl out of your hiding place in the morning. You go out into the street and you see that a new building has been destroyed,” Prykhodko says. “That was also part of what I was doing, I was experiencing what Ukrainians had been experiencing.”

She visited the warehouse where Razom stores supplies when they arrive in Ukraine. There, volunteers take requests from hospitals, first responders, and military units. About 20 drivers then take the supplies all over the country.

While there, she traveled with one of the groups Razom funds to deliver aid to small towns near the border with Russia that had been liberated only a few weeks earlier after months of occupation. The locals she met were mostly elderly or disabled or had young children — people who couldn’t easily flee. They didn’t even flinch at nearby shelling, Prykhodko says. Some were living in homes that had been destroyed except for a single room and lacked a kitchen or bathroom.

“There’s a missile sticking out of their house, and they don’t have a roof over their heads, but that’s what they have left,” she says. “They’re all traumatized.”

One of the groups that Razom has helped support, the Kharkiv With You Charitable Foundation, delivers food to people who are trying to survive in areas like this, that have been shelled and lack water, gas, and electricity. The group has been working with a network of cafes, restaurants, and volunteers to make 1,000 to 5,000 meals a day, thanks to a $30,000 grant from Razom.

The money, which allowed the group to make and deliver meals from May until July, recently ran out. Nataliya Yakovleva, the group’s founder, asked Razom to help pay for medical expenses for its volunteers, which it is now doing. She says some have become ill, and there is usually an increase in health problems in the fall and winter.

This work would not be possible without help from Razom, says Yakovleva, who was a human-resource director before the invasion. “Razom is the best,” she says. “If I have a question, they help me very quickly. Everything changes quickly in our city.”