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.

Column

Change

Community

9 May 2024

4 min read

Reform votes: what really matters in the end

Two votes, three decades apart.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A grand dinner table set for a meal sits within a large room with paintings on the wall.

The dining room of the Garrick Club.

I was this week one of several hundred members of the Garrick Club, with many more attending online, crammed into a central London conference room to vote on whether women could be admitted as members for the first time since our founding in 1831.

We Garrick members rather fancy ourselves as a secret society – and it was a rich irony that our vote was held in the same block as the Freemasons’ Hall in Great Queen Street.

Actually, I rather like the tradition that what’s said and done in the Garrick stays in the Garrick. So this isn’t about our club’s internal wrangling and politics, beyond the now widespread news that women were voted as eligible for membership by a majority of 60 per cent.

Rather than go further into that, I want to compare it with another well-fought fight for women’s inclusion: The admission of the female gender to the priesthood of the Church of England, more or less exactly 30 years ago in 1994.

Much of what was going on in the Church then was being rehearsed again in London WC2 this week. You might call it long overdue dismantlements of patriarchal institutions, even if neither the Church nor our club would self-identify as such. No case could continue to be sustained for all-male preferment in our Church or in our club.

To their great credit, the vote was won for reform by those who decided to work together, without rancour or resentment, in preference to further division and bitterness.

There are two observations I would make of the Church precedent that may be of some comfort to my fellow club members, who may feel that nothing will ever be quite the same again. The first of these is quite a quick point. After a couple of weeks of women’s priesthood, almost everyone in the Church wondered what all the fuss had been about. Ordained women became a natural part of the priestly fabric of the Church really that quickly.

Yes, provision had to be made for those who in conscience couldn’t accept women’s ordained ministry, so the process was not without its pain. But three decades on, women priests (and subsequently and inevitably bishops) are so much part of the weave of that fabric that most church congregations feel they’ve always been there.

The second point I would make is that I know anecdotally of very many traditionalists opposed to women’s ordination who, at the General Synod, either voted for women or abstained when the result became inevitable. To have fought a last-ditch, hopeless defence could only have lastingly damaged the Church’s reputation and ministry.

To their great credit, the vote was won for reform by those who decided to work together, without rancour or resentment, in preference to further division and bitterness. My feeling is that a tranche of Garrickian votes were cast for similar reasons.

These were women at the top of their game. It’s just taken a couple of millennia for our churches and clubs to catch up.

The comparison of a gentleman’s club and gentleman’s church is an imperfect one. Members of a church could be male or female; only the clergy were strictly male. There were profound theological and ecclesiological arguments (though I don’t share them) made against the prospect of women priests by Anglo-Catholics, which aren’t available to fans of men-only clubs.

But the similarities between the institutions are founded on the principles of patriarchy nevertheless. The idea that men, in private circumstances, can behave and associate in the pretence that they are still in charge of everything, as they were in the nineteenth century, both at church and in clubland.

This doesn’t matter much when it comes to the likes of all-boy or all-girl sports teams – though it’s a delight to see Woodlanders Football Club, Lioness-cubs to a girl, beat the boys to win their cup.

It begins to matter very much indeed when the senior figures of professions and public institutions seek to associate only with their male colleagues. That’s as true of a boss who takes only the boys in the office to a rugby match at Twickenham as it is of gentlemen’s clubs. It may be patriarchy-lite, but it is rooted in the same hegemony that gave the Church its patriarchs.

It’s an irony as rich as the location of this week’s Garrick vote that the gospel is far from patriarchal in its narratives, even though the language of Father and Son so ostensibly is. The Nazarene, scandalously for his day, freely associates with women. The Jesus movement is radical in gender equality in a manner that its Church has failed down the centuries to emulate.

Jesus gives full messianic attention to a despised and shamed Samaritan woman; he saves an adulterous woman (code for prostitute) from stoning; he stops to address a bleeding woman who just wants to touch him; as the risen Christ, he gives a woman, Mary of Magdala, the greatest apostolic mission in history to tell his dispersed disciples what she has witnessed.

Little wonder women appear so prominently in the Acts of the Apostles. These were women at the top of their game. It’s just taken a couple of millennia for our churches and clubs to catch up.