Searching for Sasha: Ukrainian Grantees on the Front Lines

The nonprofit, founded by a group of journalists in 2001, launched the missing children center in 2005, and joined Missing Children Europe in 2017, becoming part of a network that includes a hotline for all of Europe. It offers an avenue for families trying to locate children from whom they have become separated.

In all, GMF has awarded just under $1.5 million to 71 Ukraine-based civic organizations and independent media outlets since the invasion.

“Hope can be delivered immediately in the form of urgently needed humanitarian assistance,” said GMF President Heather A. Conley.  “But hope is most powerful when it delivers a better future. This is why GMF is focused on Ukraine’s recovery and reconstruction and on providing civil society and local leaders with the tools they need to build a more secure and prosperous Ukraine, in the spirit of the Marshall Plan.”

And as of December, 2,619 schools in Ukraine were damaged, with 15 percent of those completely destroyed, noted Olexandr Elkin, who led the formation of EdCamp Ukraine, and is himself a third-generator educator.

Yet classes for young Ukrainians go on – in underground bunkers, metro stations where locals gathered to shelter from shelling at the start of the war, and even from the battlefield via Internet. Now teachers hold lessons at cafes and on the street itself during power outages. And EdCamp works to provide support for its challenged teachers via a consistent online community.

Olena Trybko, a mathematics and computer science teacher in Pomichna south of Kiev, recalled a day when one of her teenage students, sheltering with her sister in their basement, panicked and began weeping at the sound of air sirens.

“She became hysterical, so I called her,” Trybko wrote for the initiative. “Together we began to do breathing exercises; then we talked and laughed until the all-clear signal sounded.” Trybko used exercises from an Ed-Camp Ukraine program.

Missing months of vital education is just one of the ways war impacts children. “Toxic stress,” caused by protracted periods of violence, can lead to lasting trauma and even alter brain structures, shaping the rest of a child’s life.

Needed Now More Than Ever

Lypovetska recalls another case that sticks with her—that of a 15-year-old girl abducted after Russian soldiers shot and killed both her parents and wounded the girl in her leg. Her younger sister was set free.

The older sister, though, is still being held. “I’m worrying very much what they will do, because she is a witness to a war crime,” Lypovetska said.

But there are also successes, Lypovetska notes, underscoring that “we are needed now more than ever.”

She recounts the case of 16-year-old Vlad Buryak, son of a high-ranking government leader in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, who was abducted by Russian soldiers when he was in a car trying to evacuate Melitopol. Russian troops tried to blackmail the father.

Magnolia helped bring international pressure to bear, and the boy was released after three months. “I received this news on the 8^th of July and my birthday is on the 9^th so you can imagine how happy I was,” Lypovetsky says.