Ukraine Update March

Written by Willem Wigman | April 5, 2022
Ukraine Update March

This March our customers donated a little over €6.000 to Ukraine

As a continuation of our support campaign to the Ukrainian people, we've made a donation to a Ukrainian refugee shelter in Poland, ran by Marta Molińska.

Together with her colleagues from Sky Camp, Marta is doing amazing work - working tirelessly for the past 5 weeks creating a safe harbour for Ukrainian families who've had to flee their homes and country because of the violence russia has brought to them. Please continue reading below to find out what Marta's organisation is doing and how you can possible help, too.

Our campaign continues, meaning that with any license bought with Hyvä, 10 percent of the license fee will go to a charity of our choosing to support Ukraine.

We try to determine each month where our donation will have the strongest impact.

Anyone who bought a license with us earlier this year, has effectively supported Ukraine. 

The choice of charity

If you've been to a Magento event in Poland, chances are pretty big that Marta Molińska organized that event. Being the event-manager for Snowdog, she has a very close connection to the Magento community. We've been following her story along on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn for the past weeks. 

What will happen with the donation

Here's what information Marta has sent us in response to our donation. Since we consider our customer co-donators, we think it's relevant for you to see in what way your donation is making a real difference on peoples lives.

First of all I would like to thank you for your trust and commitment. (...) We will use your donation to buy the most needed supplies for the Refugees to help them start over in the new country: school products for the kids, used bikes for them so they can go do school, used laptops for the families so they can use the internet not only on their phones. And since I think the internet access is one of the fundamental rights now (because of the information access), we'd also like to fund some routers for the families that we take care of after they leave the shelter.

I explained it briefly in my LinkedIn post, but to be clear with you I also want to let you know how this works:

  1. First the families arrive to our shelter (not sure where do they get the info about us from, I think it's shared between Ukrainians now) and it's usually their first stop after travelling from Ukraine
  2. First day or two they sleep and rest
  3. Second and third day they try to focus on the new reality and decide what's next (going to other western countries, staying in Poland for good, staying in Poland only until the war is over?)
  4. Next days are for the formalities (they need to get the official Refugee status, PESEL which is a personal ID in Poland, social care money for the kids, bank account, electronic identity profile ePuap etc.). It takes a lot of driving from one office to another and a lot of time as well.
  5. At the same time they usually try to find a job. Volunteers help them in preparing CV in Polish/English and they try to find a place for them to work.
  6. I take care of finding them a proper place to live. Our shelter-like conditions are good for a start but not really for a normal life (unless you are a skydiver;) In the beginning it was very easy to find a flat or a room. But Poznan ran out of free places to share with Ukrainians so for families with working women we look for flats for rent and then we cover the first month + food/cosmetics/clothes supplies so they can focus on reorganising their life.
  7. When we move our families to a new location, it also takes a lot of driving and a lot of time to carry their new stuff (quite often we buy missing furniture like beds, chairs etc.)

We also decided to hire one of the Refugees, Angelina, to help us to keep the place up and running despite our skydiving season starting in a few weeks.
I can see that only her alone is not enough so we might consider hiring one more person.

As you can see the costs are very high with endless needs (unfortunately). I really do hope this madness will end soon...
We also decided that if we have any money left at the time when the war is over, we will send everything we have to a trusted organisation in Ukraine that will take care of humanitarian help for those who lost their homes (not all the houses are bombed after all).

This is more or less how the process looks like. If you want to see our story day by day, here is our facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/skycampdz

-- Marta Molińska

 

Please consider donating too

If you are able, please consider helping Ukrainians too. You can do this in multiple ways, like donating to charities such as the one Marta is running (PayPal transfer to office@skycamp.pl, or contact Marta directly for banking details).

Alternatively, please consider hiring Ukrainian developers/agencies, most of them are fully functional and eager to work, even from harsh cicumstances. Some lost a chunk of their business due to the war, meaning they have capacity to take on projects on short term. If you have doubts about the capabilities of Ukrainian developers, you should realise Magento was built largely by Ukrainians and many of the biggest Magento extention vendors are located in Ukraine.

We've bumped the Ukrainian Agencies working with Hyvä to the top of our suppliers page and we're trying to actively connect Ukainian developers with our customers, please reach out if we can help you with this.

 

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Willem Wigman
Willem Wigman

Founder and creator of Hyvä Themes.

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