Helping those leaving Ukraine in 2022: Experiences of a British, grassroots volunteer organization

• In Event: Societal responses to the Russian war: grassroots initiatives’ and NGOs’ engagement in Poland and Ukraine

Abstract

In my paper I show how and why in February 2022 I helped co-found KHARPP (The Kharkiv and Przemyśl Project), a grassroots organization – now a UK-registered charity – working in both Poland and Ukraine. The talk is split up into three parts: an overview of who we are, both as an organization and the individuals within it; what we have been doing; and what we are currently doing and continue to do. The first two parts focuses on the first six months (February-August 2022) of Russia’s escalation of its invasion of Ukraine, and the final part looks at our work from August 2022 onwards. In the paper, I mainly focus on our work in the Polish town of Przemyśl, located on the Polish-Ukrainian border and a focal point for those leaving Ukraine, but also look at our projects in Kharkiv region. The main argument to be made is that small, flexible grassroots organisations were, and still are, effective actors in delivering, Ukrainian-centered aid to Ukrainians both inside and outside Ukraine since February 2022.
In the first part of my talk I outline the main actors in our organization during the first six months of its work. During this time, I went with a group of friends to Przemyśl, Poland, to help those leaving Ukraine. All of us were Russian speakers, working as lecturers and researchers in UK universities. None of us were charity or aid workers at the time. I also highlight how the group became a more structured organization, how other volunteers joined the team, and how we raised money individually and collectively.
In the second part of my talk, I look at what we did and describe the type of assistance we gave. We administered various help which can be split up into that which needed funding from donors – buying tickets for transport across Europe; paying for temporary accommodation – and assistance related to our skills – help with interpreting and giving general information.
In the final part, I look at what happened after August 2022. As our programmes in Przemyśl became less needed – bigger organisations began to offer assistance at the end of Summer 2022; the number of those crossing into Poland from Ukraine plateaued – we shifted our efforts into working in Kharkiv region, Ukraine. (We closed down our operations in Przemyśl in early 2023.) In Kharkiv, we opened a new direction in our assistance: we began reconstructing homes and buildings in formerly occupied and/or frontline villages. Our work in Kharkiv is where we have now focused all our resources and will continue to do so going forward. To date we have raised over £500k and rebuilt over 650 buildings.
In the paper, I use methods related to accidental ethnography (Fuji, 2015) and interpretive anthropology (Geertz, 1973) to reflect critically upon why we, both as individuals and an organization, acted in the ways we did. To conclude, I show how our personal experiences (see Tsymbalyuk’s reflections (2022; 2023) on ‘embodied knowledge) as volunteers since February 2022 have affected our academic research and teaching.

Bibliography
Fuji, L. A. (2015). Five stories of accidental ethnography: Turning unplanned moments in the field into data. Qualitative Research, 15(4)
Geertz C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books
Tsymbalyuk, D (2022). Academia must recentre embodied and uncomfortable knowledge. Nature Human Behaviour. 6.
Tsymbalyuk, D (2023). What my body taught me about being a scholar of Ukraine and from Ukraine in times of Russia’s war of aggression. Journal of International Relations and Development.

Author

• Panayiotis Xenophontos, University of Oxford