Supporting Ukraine
On 24 February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine in a major escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War that began in 2014.
At "Wayair Foundation" we knew we needed to act immediately!
We are a team of educators, communication experts, scholars, and architects. Our projects focus on education and sustainability work in Eastern Europe and East Africa, where we work in close collaboration with local organizations, leaders and children.
The invasion of Ukraine has focused our action on supporting the immediate and long-terms needs of Ukrainian refugees in Poland and beyond.
Evacuating refugees from Ukraine
As an organization, we have been immediately involved in evacuating vulnerable individuals, including children from orphanages and foreign students, and providing medical and other aid.
Suzanne’s story
One of the students we helped to evacuate was Suzanne, an international medical student from Tanzania who was studying in Sumy when the war broke out.
We helped Suzanne safely flee the war zone, and then to settle and integrate in Poland. In June 2022, Suzanne passed her entry exams at the University of Medicine in Poznan, Poland and on October 1st started her new life as a medical student in Poland.
Long-term support for Ukrainian refugees: our initiatives
Today, we are working strategically to understand and address the long-term needs of Ukrainian refugees in Poland. We are implementing a number of projects:
1. Helping refugees meet their basic needs such as housing, health, education, and safety
2. Offering mental health and psychological support
3. Helping refugees to find employment or start their own businesses
4.Gathering materials and supplies for Ukrainians at war
1
Safety and Stability for children
The "Safe House" project was created to help women with very small children adapt to their new circumstances and mitigate the risks of homelessness. We help women who were forced to flee their homes find stability and start adjusting to their new place. We cover the costs of rent, food, and basic necessities, as well as access to psychological care. Currently, 10 mothers and 15 children have found shelter and support thanks to our "Safe House" project.
We help newly arrived refugees with:
Organising places to live - accommodation, furniture
Food - daily and weekly meals and groceries
Clothing - shoes, clothes,
School supplies,
Computers, laptops,
Baby carriegies and other baby necessities
2
psychological support for women and children
As refugee women and children started settling in in Poland, many psychological needs emerged, as well as the needs for long term and systematic support. We have worked closely with experts to enabling free access to professional psychological help, select psychologists specializing in war trauma, and establishing cooperation with a psycho traumatologists from Switzerland, Germany, Ukraine, and Poland. We have also organised on-line psychological workshops for Polish and Ukrainian teachers and for families hosting refugees titled "Stress, PTSD trauma - how to recognize and deal with the first symptoms in children at school".Additionally, we organised therapeutic trips for children and adolescents and organisised art therapy workshops in collaboration with the Marshal's Office. In summary, we facilitated:
Individual therapy: more than 300 hours, 100+ women and children benefiting
Workshops: 4 Art Therapy workshops; 12 Gestalt Method workshops for Ukrainian NGO and for teachers
English Classes: 21 patricipants, new group ready to start from January 2023
3 supervision sessions
3
Work security and entrepreneurship
As Wayair Foundation, we have been also involved in helping women navigate the Polish job market and help to match them with companies and employers according to their skills and experience. One area where we have been very active was to enable Ukrainian women with experience in the beauty sector to restart their business in Poland - supporting them with studio rental, equipment, cosmetics, and finding customers. We have also supported women to train as preschool teachers and develop their skills to be able to work in or open their own pre-schools in the Montessori method of education, which is in high demand in Poland. We have also supported women with no previous work experience to find their first employment.
4
Materials and supplies for Ukraine
In cooperation with volunteers from Cracow and Lviv we were able to directly support the Ukrainian Army by supplying the UAF brigades in Kherson, Zaporozhzhia, Kharkiv and Bakhmut regions with:
Medical supplies and rescue medicine equipment (such as about 600 NAR CAT Gen 7 tourniquets, a couple of hundreds of individual wound dressing sets, c.a. 100 first aid kit-bags, c.a. 50 tactical scissors, about 100 homeostatic QuikClot combat gauze packages, over 1000 syringes, all kinds of different medicines, special nutrition and food supplements)
Additional equipment: almost a hundred of tactical gloves, knee and elbow pads, two starlink sets, electric heaters, 3 laptop computers, a few gas stoves, about 100 sets of thermal underwear and other clothing items for the military.
