Field Trip 2024

KentRelief recently completed a second field trip to Ukraine in June of this year.  The trip’s purpose was to meet with new partners and beneficiaries to better understand their set up and their needs.  Key to this was to explore a potential partnership with the Swedish organisation Operation Change – with a view to collaborating and also making use of their warehouse space in Dnipro to get our aid further into Ukraine and therefore more speedily to the east.  To this end we first visited their main operations centre in Stockholm, and then visited their in-country team and warehouse in Dnipro, Ukraine. The in-country team have a fantastic new warehouse space in Dnipro, having moved from Kharkiv when their warehouse got damaged.  They conduct monthly missions to frontline villages, providing the civilians with essential food, medical, and clothing items.  We will be looking to partner with them to get our aid distributed and also agreed to gather aid on their behalf.

Meeting the Operation Change Team Stockholm

Operation Change in country team Dnipro

In addition the trip was a chance to meet beneficiaries we had not yet had the chance to meet, in particular our two partners in Odesa.  It was an exhausting two week journey covering the entire length of Ukraine and beyond but absolutely worth it to see the fantastic work being done in country and to better understand the needs on the ground.  In Odesa Alex is doing amazing work supporting animal shelters, whilst Olga from the Charity Path to Home is supporting three shelters for displaced people from Mykolaiv and Kherson.  She also works closely with UNICEF.

Our partner Olga in Odesa

Visiting animal shelter in Odesa with Alex

From Odesa to Dnipro we then continued on to Kremenchuk to meet our new partner Oleg who runs the organisation Volunteers for the Defence of Kremenchuk.  Oleg works along with around five volunteers who deliver aid to the frontline in the Poltava region, helping both civilians and soldiers.  He also supports a recovery centre for soldiers in Kremenchuk.  Working with partners, he has developed a medical operating device which quickly removes shrapnel from wounds with the use of a specialised magnet.  These instruments are provided free of charge to hospitals for their use.  Olegs work and his medical device has attracted a lot of attention and he has featured on the news in both Germany and Sweden.  We are hoping to promote his fantastic work in the UK.

Meeting with Oleg in Kremenchuk

Oleg presenting us with a sample of his medical instrument, Kremenchuk

We then popped in to see our beneficiaries in Cherkasy, who we continue to provide aid too, and had a catch up with our partner Anastasia in Brovary, before heading to Bila Tserkva to meet new partners Svidoma who are doing fantastic work with Internally Displaced People (IDPs) – women and children forced to evacuate from the frontline towns they lived in.  Ksenia and her charity provide after school classes and excursions, counselling, aid in the form of food, medical and clothing, and arrange career talks for the IDP women to start careers in their new town. In addition the children interact with soldiers, visiting them in hospitals, sending presents to the frontline and putting on plays for them.  It was a wonderful meeting and we have signed a Partnership Agreement with them.

Catching up with Anastasia in Brovary

Discussing needs with Bakhmut Refugees in Cherkasy

Meeting with Svidoma in Bila Tserkva

Svidoma visit

We finished the journey by meeting with Andrii, our partner in Lviv.  The journey was incredibly useful and has helped us to better understand needs and logistics and further network with partners in Ukraine.  In addition we are very hopeful to build a meaningful partnership with Operation Change.