Millions of Ukrainians on the move set off an aid revolution

Christian Aid’s Head of Humanitarian Policy Simone Di Vicenz argues the Ukraine war shows a change in approach is required to respond more effectively to global crises.

Simone Di Vicenz

Simone Di Vicenz is Christian Aid’s Head of Humanitarian Policy.

People help unload aid parcels from the side of a van, some wearing body armour.

In a recently liberated Ukrainian village, locals unload aid they helped choose.

Credit: Christian Aid.

In the first few months of the war, TV news showed the pictures we have come to expect of civilians caught up in conflict: rapid evacuations, temporary shelters and soup kitchens as millions left their homes for safety. Donations poured in from around the world to pay for this response.

Christian Aid was at the heart of this by channelling donations to our Ukraine partners such as Hungarian Interchurch Aid (HIA) and HEKS-EPER of the Swiss German church. Nothing was easy in those early frantic weeks but these long-established international charities already working in Ukraine had the contacts and legal permits to scale up their support for those on the move.

Months later, those donations are still helping and are paying for different kinds of help as the needs of displaced people evolve. Christian Aid has now made its own direct links to Ukrainian national charity organisations like the Alliance for Public Health (APH).

It’s an umbrella organisation supporting even smaller partners on the ground and through them Christian Aid has pioneered and applied a community-led way of working. It involves displaced people deciding for themselves their own priorities for the kind of support they need. In short, international charities must do more listening and less telling.

The advantages of this approach, known as survivor and community led response or “sclr” are remarkable. Instead of large impersonal and distant support, agencies are going down to the micro-level of organisation such as church groups, village councils and school parents.

To succeed, local people need to collaborate on what they want, how to do it and who to involve. It breeds community cohesion, empowerment, and self-help.

These small, community-level groups know much better their urban or rural needs. For example, Christian Aid small grants of a few hundred pounds, for APH and Heritage organisations in Odesa, bought playground equipment for a children’s centre and a generator to draw water from a well in a recently liberated village.

Instead of relying on big blobs of non-transparent funding sloshing around vulnerable to fraud and waste, small groups of individuals are much more accountable to each other. Although no system is perfect, locals will know if the cash has been spent because the playground equipment and generator are there or they’re not.

It’s not just about receiving aid. The process itself brings people together by repurposing existing civil society groups or supporting new ones where Ukrainians have joined up to help those who have left occupied regions.

To succeed, local people need to collaborate on what they want, how to do it and who to involve. It breeds community cohesion, empowerment, and self-help - especially among women having to operate without their partners. One microgrant provided by Christian Aid to a local kindergarten was used to pay skilled locals to build an internal staircase to a kindergarten bomb shelter.

The sclr concept has been evolving since it was first used after the Haiti earthquake but the scale of the war in Ukraine has supercharged its application because it can be replicated easily by Christian Aid’s network of faith and non-faith Ukrainian partners across the country. It’s also being enthusiastically adopted by Christian Aid’s bigger partners like HIA and HEKS. They too can see the advantages of moving beyond “traditional” humanitarian support.

Christian Aid believes this community-led approach is a message of hope for the future as Ukraine moves away from its post-Soviet past. It’s a model for a civil society after the war where local people are entrusted and empowered to decide their own futures. It’s also a model that we’d like to see more aid agencies copy in other global crises.

Who knows, that in an age of government and institutional distrust, it might even be an approach that could be adapted to revitalise grassroots democracy in the UK.

Find out more about Christian Aid's work on empowering locally-led action in Ukraine.

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America

Change

Politics

Trauma

7 November 2024

3 min read

How America reckons with its fractured reality

The first thing is always to listen. To sit. To feel.

Jared Stacy

Jared Stacy holds a Theological Ethics PhD from the University of Aberdeen. His research focuses conspiracy theory, politics, and evangelicalism.

Two people sit at the table, one dictates as the other types. Behind a banner reads: write a postcard to the next president.i

Artist Sheryl Oring types messages to the president.

instagram/usf_npml

Yesterday, the day after the election, I preached a funeral. I heard the name of our President-elect only once. But I did speak on Jesus and Lazarus. About pain and loss.

I named our enemy, death, that robber, cheat, and swindler. And I spoke about grief—we all grieve in so many different ways. And then about tears. I shared about the man from Nazareth, whose public grief before the tomb of his friend drew hushed whispers from onlookers.

It was, you may remember, a tomb he was about to open. He knew, Jesus did, what he was about to do. And did it so that those who were there would become witnesses to precisely what God is about: defeating death. “Come out, Lazarus!” says Jesus, and he does.

The Christian faith, I told the grieving, would have us believe that even in our grief, there is a hope that hems it in. That Jesus enters our darkness and comes to rob death of its finality. I love too that Jesus says next— “Unbind him!” —turning onlookers into witnesses and participants.

This was how I spent my day. I’m not sure I could have spend it any better. Not because it was an escape from the election, but it forced some perspective on me. Because T.S. Eliot is right: “we cannot bear much reality.”

Here, political autopsies are everywhere. Some talk of the Democrat’s conceit, of denying President Biden’s liability as a candidate, bypassing the primaries, refusing to meet economic concerns. There’s talk of Trump’s genius and what looks to be the end of his legal troubles. There’s talk of the downfall of America, of ascendant and aspiring authoritarianisms. Perhaps. Especially if we take Trump at his word.

But as the funeral ends, I’m weighed down by the messages I’m starting to read. Not about the results alone. Not questions about political strategy and futures. No, these are pained voices from a Christian community in America betraying itself.

My phone messages are filled with stories of pain and loss. Friends and strangers alike, enduring the same loss, the same betrayal. The communities that taught us the faith now distort it. And none of this is new.

Howard Thurman, who mentored Martin Luther King Jr., said it back in 1946: “the tragic truth is that the church permits various hate groups in our common life to establish squatter’s rights in the minds of believers because there has been no adequate teaching on the meaning of the faith in terms of human dignity.” This loss has been with us for generations. But these fissures and fractures are ours to bear today. And they are not unconnected from the social and political chaos of America.

Martin Luther once said, “living, dying, and being damned makes one a theologian.” This has taught me to welcome, rather than despise, accusations that question the validity of my faith. It’s also made me suspicious of the misplaced messianic hope from which such questions emerge. It’s a false hope not easily displaced.

Before I returned to the States from living in Scotland these last few years, a good friend told me honestly: “perhaps America will have to ride it out, all of it, until it’s done.” The thought seemed a far-off scenario then. But I think he’s right.

When Israel built the golden calf in the wilderness, Moses made them grind it up into powder, mixing it in their drinks. The Christian community in America, whether we realize it our not, will soon be drinking our idolatry down to the dregs with consequences beyond Christian community itself.

And people ask, “what should we do?” And I think that time is near for that question. But the first thing is always to listen. To sit. To feel. And to remember that it’s not for nothing that Jesus, who pronounced so many woes over Jerusalem, also wept over it.

This article’s image is of Sheryl Oring, an artist who invites the public to write to the next president. She has typed and sent thousands of messages to the White House every election since 2004 as part of her performance series I Wish to Say. Read more about her and the letters: Artist Invites the Public to Write Letters to the Next US President