Explainer
Change
War & peace
3 min read

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 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.

 

Article
Change
Mental Health
1 min read

Removing pain’s barriers to healing

How do we open the window to let the air in?
A window sheds light through locked bars into a dusty and dark room,
Denny Müller on Unsplash.

One of the trickiest situations you can encounter if you’re a counsellor is having a client you can’t reach. They sit there in front of you, pain in their eyes, but somehow every approach you make meets with resistance. It’s like trying to touch someone through a closed window – you can see them, but you keep bumping into the glass. 

I have two at the moment. One is Cypriot; I’ll call her Androulla, and she scares me rather as she is a doctor and never smiles and knows everything. ‘Yes, I have tried that,’ she says. ‘Yes, I am familiar with that book/ line of thinking/ philosophical method – it hasn’t worked for me.’ 

And I know that we’ve found the poisonous plant in the heart of her heart and pulled it up by the roots. I am as sure as I can be that she will get better now.

Yet she is dreadfully sad. Her mother died out in Cyprus, and she couldn’t get there in time. Her grief is eating her. She glares at me, desperate to be helped but bristling with gun turrets. Hmm. 

Eventually I remember something Jane Goodall said. Jane Goodall is one of the world’s wonderful people… her work with chimpanzees back in the 60s dramatically changed our relationship with animals, and she still travels the world at the age of nearly 90 encouraging young people to take action on climate change. In her lovely Book of Hope she describes how when she’s completely knackered or stuck with something, she sort of hands herself over to an outside power. ‘I just relax and decide to appeal to the source of hidden strength,’ she writes. ‘There’s a wisdom that’s far, far, far greater than my own.’ When she surrenders in this way, she often gives her best lectures she says.  

I think I might give it a try with Androulla. As a gradually-learning-to-be-more-trusting Christian, it seems most appropriate to follow in the footsteps of St Francis. So just before our next session I shut my eyes and say, ‘Help Lord, I don’t know what to say to her. Please take over and use me as a channel – she could really do with your peace and grace, and I seem to be in the way’. I’m quite a controlling person normally so I feel a bit reluctant… but if it works for Jane Goodall and for St Francis, I’m not going to argue! 

To my surprise, I find myself asking Androulla what her understanding of the word ‘mercy’ might be – not a very usual counselling question. Even more surprising, her eyes fill with tears and suddenly she says that the last time she saw her mother, she told her she hated her, and had a physical fight with her and hurt the skin on her old arms. Crying properly now, the poor woman says she doesn’t deserve forgiveness after that, and I find myself telling her how mercy sees everything with utter clarity and loves and accepts it whatever is deserved or not deserved. And I know that we’ve found the poisonous plant in the heart of her heart and pulled it up by the roots. I am as sure as I can be that she will get better now. 

Something compassionate has breathed on these locks, and the stuck windows have suddenly yielded and opened to let the air in. 

Then today the same thing happens again – with Bella, my other client who cannot forgive herself, in this case for the fact that her violent alcoholic husband drank even more after she finally left him and died of organ failure in a homeless shelter. We’ve gone over and over her guilt for weeks, and she has remained shiny and brittle and artificially bright and fine. We’ve got nowhere. Until now. ‘Dear Lord,’ I say before I ring her, ‘help me find a way through to her. Let me remove myself and all my assumptions, so that your healing can flow through to her and give her some rest.’ I do my best to relax into our conversation, just to let what wants to come, come. And out of nowhere, I am suddenly inspired to ask her whether she’d feel guilty if her husband had died of some terrible illness like cancer. 

‘No,’ she says. 

‘Well… you’re a medical secretary. You’ll know better than me that alcoholism is an illness,’ I say. 

There’s a very long silence. 

‘Doesn’t that mean you’ve both been suffering from this terrible illness?’ I ask eventually. ‘Dave because it drove him crazy and then killed him; you because it blighted your life, and is blighting it still? Isn’t it time you said, “No, enough!” to this pestilence?’ 

I can see it in my mind’s eye, the alcoholism, like a swarm of red locusts or a scarlet dragon, devouring both Bella and Dave. I don’t feel that’s an image I came up with, it’s just there in my mind. I can feel this lodging in Bella’s mind too… a whole new way of thinking, a great big shift in emphasis, a transfer of responsibility from her to the monster. 

I don’t know whether the idea is fully rooted yet, whether we can rely on it to grow and flourish and bear good fruit. But I sense that it is at least planted and watered. A bit more sunshine, some careful tending… and probably a lot more trusting would seem to be the way forward. 

It’s not in the training manual, this technique. You won’t hear the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy recommending that therapists hand themselves over to Jane Goodall’s ‘outside power’. But something compassionate has breathed on these locks, and the stuck windows have suddenly yielded and opened to let the air in.