photo by David Lam
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As the full-scale invasion kicked off, most Ukrainian NGOs pivoted to helping IDPs and delivering supplies. Committee for Open Democracy, an American organization that had been doing campaigns and elections observations before the war, transformed its mission through the HelpUkraine22 project. It started to supply humanitarian aid itself and in addition, created a platform to help other engaged initiatives coordinate their logistics.
Ever since, the project has been helping deliver aid and providing about 96 grants to its partner Ukrainian NGOs, the project’s representative David Lam says.
«It’s quite an effective way to score. You see a lot of American organizations and other international NGOs that are trying to set up their own stand-alone operation, but it’s much more effective to provide grants and empower Ukrainian partners. For instance, according to the most up-to-date stats, we’ve spent 808 thousand dollars and helped about 330 thousand Ukrainians, including sheltering, feeding them, giving them medical appointments and the whole gamut,» – he shares.
On his side, David has been building a system that takes requests from the household units and allows the project to analyse and aggregate the data to determine what the actual needs are. For its effective functioning, they issue partner accounts to other organisations that want to participate and help other Ukrainians.
«We have the HelpUkraine network page on our main organization website, helpukraine22.org. We are also partners with the Ministry of Social Policy. Ever since we’ve been posting on their site, we received approximately 400 pieces of requests on the household unit level, most of them about food.»
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According to David, among the main needs, finances and food go hand in hand. People are mostly asking for financial support because of losing their jobs or internal displacement. Thus, the other family members have to find a way to pay the rent, utilities, and cover other basic expenses, while food is selected because it’s an immediate need.
The next level in prioritizing the help requests is general humanitarian aid, which is set up as another category in the system. Medicine follows as the fourth category.
«We’re trying to find bigger organizations that are bringing in pounds of food and getting our local Ukrainian partners to pick up these food packages and deliver them to these families. And the beautiful point is that you can map it out and see where the needs are,» – he continues.
The top three regions that are experiencing the most needs are Dnipro, Kyiv and Odesa, David says.
«These are the three largest clusters from where we’re receiving all these requests, although there are other areas that may not have access to the internet or may not know about us.»
In the beginning of the war, there were a lot of evacuation and transportation requests, but those types of requests died down soon and got replaced by the four categories already mentioned, David Lam says.
«Our system is great because it can track data in real-time, so we can pull up reports in real-time and figure out what the immediate needs are, break it down by region. This way, it’s very valuable as a decision-making tool. We love to have other international NGOs participate so that they can pivot their operations as well and adapt to the current situation and climate.»
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Right now, HelpUkraine is still onboarding partners. So far of the completed cases, «Armada Network» an American-based NGO is partnered with a local pharmacy chain that has helped send medicine. According to David, they have a network of local Ukrainians who understand what is happening on the ground and help indicate the most urgent needs.
«We’ve been able to ship about 20 cases worth of medical supplies to other places. For instance, we’ve sent $5000 worth of medicines to Kharkiv maternity and children’s hospital. In this perspective, 5 thousand US dollars doesn’t sound like a lot in US terms, but remember that prices of medicines in the US are astronomically high, and not for a good reason. So it’s more around $25-30 thousand worth if we translate it to US terms, which is a significant amount,» – the project’s representative explains.
As for the platform itself, like many other websites, everything is based on the intake of smart forms, he says. In terms of the flow of data, it experiences about ten cases of requests a day. To process them all, the project often onboards other partners that have received grants from it to refer some cases to them.
«We’re taking information from there, and in our backend, we have a case management system, which is a special part about it. It’s a Salesforce-based system, and the beauty of it is that we can issue accounts to other NGOs. Once we uptake their information, we decide either we solve that case ourselves or share it with our local partners on the platform. This also allows for multiple organizations to chat in a chatbox to coordinate as well.»
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If donors or other organizations post their inventory, that gets immediately shared with all other partners, David Lam says. The project finds a way to distribute the aid, so that it’s flowing to the areas that otherwise would not receive this stuff. A couple of other organisations, in particular Ukrainian Freedom News, founded by Lviv Now’s editor Joseph Lindsley, use the HelpUkraine platform as a tracking tool to move their own supplies, including the delivery of personal properties and individual first aid kits to the frontlines.
«We have five main partner organizations, most of them Ukraine-based. Private industry partners can get accounts as well, for instance, North American Rescue. Anyone who’s on our platform can get humanitarian aid pricing,» – David Lam says.
As for its own operation, the project tries to reduce its expenses on it to the highest possible extent. «Our aim is 90% expenditures, because we don’t want to lose impact overhead, making sure that we push the aid packages out to support our partners who are helping others,» – David Lam summarizes.
By Vitalii Holich
Follow us on Facebook and Instagram. Lviv Now is an English-language website for Lviv, Ukraine’s «tech-friendly cultural hub.» It is produced by Tvoe Misto («Your City») media-hub, which also hosts regular problem-solving public forums to benefit the city and its people.