dolorosa_12 | Like a burning flame

It's just over six months since Russia's fullscale invasion of Ukraine, and I just saw (and was briefly enraged by) a particularly disingenuous piece of tankie disinformation on Twitter, so I felt it was high time for a post bringing together links to organisations to whom to donate.

Before I do this, a bit of a preamble to preempt some potential questions.

There are a lot of horrendous, cruel, unjust and devastating things happening in the world, so why do I continue to focus solely on this one? There are a couple of reasons. The first is that I think individuals (unless they are extremely powerful, extremely wealthy, or involved in policymaking) are far better off picking one single issue to focus on with laser-like intensity, rather than spreading themselves thinly across a multitude of tragedies and injustices. That way lies burnout, despair, and, quite honestly, a lack of meaningful help. I think it's better to focus energies in a single direction — this is the direction I've chosen to focus mine, but obviously others can do the same by focusing singlemindedly on other issues.

The second reason is that I think this invasion — and its outcome — is probably going to be the most important geopolitical event not just in the region where I live, but also globally, for at least a generation.

And finally, the invasion itself just outrages me on a moral level. I don't like bullies, and although the world has political bullies aplenty, this is a rare instance where — with help — a bully might actually not get what they want, although getting to that point is going to be very, very hard.

Another question: why am I sharing links for donations? I'm on the record several times as saying that signal-boosting collections of donation links is a terrible form of activism (it's barely activism at all, and it often does more harm than good). However, my issue is not with making donations and encouraging others to do so — it's with passively clicking that retweet/reblog/share button without actually scrutinising the organisations (or, worse, supposed individuals) where money might be sent. (Worst example I've seen in the case of this war: a multitweet thread describing in minute detail how the tweeter in question allegedly singlehandedly destroyed a Russian pontoon bridge in Luhansk region, followed by an immediate solicitation of funds via PayPal. If anyone believes that a soldier, in June, in Luhansk, had the time or energy to painstakingly describe such things in an essay-length thread, I've got a destroyed pontoon bridge to sell them.)

So my issue is not with people making donations and encouraging others to do so — it's with people feeling they need to demonstrate they care about an issue and just clicking a button to share long lists of charities (or some random person's PayPal account) without any thought or scrutiny. However, that's not what's going on here: the list I'm going to share is basically the organisations and individuals I've been supporting — there is nothing on this list that I wouldn't (and haven't yet) given my own money to.

Finally, some explanation about the range of organisations/invididuals and my thinking behind choosing them (and not others). I made a deliberate choice to focus on Ukrainian organisations operating at either a national or local level, rather than big international aid organisations, because I could see that the former were able to offer more targeted, needed assistance, even if on a smaller scale. I also made a deliberate choice to spread my donations widely across a broad range of types of aid — military, humanitarian, rebuilding, or just simply ways to ensure a functioning society and state. I tend to pick different organisations each week, although I come back to some repeatedly. (This week, for example, I've decided to look into organisations helping civilians in Kharkiv city or Mykolaiv region, as these places are being destroyed bit by bit with daily shelling to the point that it seems to have become routine and lost in the media noise.)

With all that in mind, here is my list. Each organisation/individual has a bit of explanation and context.

Come Back Alive is an organisation which buys protective/defensive equipment for the Ukrainian military, as well as using funds to train members of the military, and combat medics, to provide rehabilitation for injured servicemembers, and to help them train to switch to civilian careers. They do not use funds to buy weapons (although they do buy things like drones). Funding the military is not a moral issue for me in this context, but I know it may be for some of you, so I would recommend reading their website in detail if you need further clarity.

United24 is the main Ukrainian government fundraising initiative. You can specify whether your donation goes towards military and demining, humanitarian aid, or rebuilding the country.

Humanitarian Support for Kherson. Funds here go to a group of volunteers who buy and distribute aid (food, medication, nappies and sanitary products, etc) to people trapped in the occupied Kherson region. (Basically they go and buy this stuff in Odesa and then in various complicated ways get it to the people in the occupied villages, at great personal risk.)

The Kyiv Independent is an independent Ukrainian English-language news organisation. As the daughter of two journalists, a functioning media is really important to me, and in wartime, with clouds of disinformation distorting the situation, this is particularly important. I have elected to make monthly payments to the Kyiv Independent on Patreon, but it's also possible to make a one-off donation on GoFundMe or contribute to their fundraiser supporting Ukrainian media more broadly.

Olia Hercules is a Ukrainian chef based in the UK. She has been fundraising via various initiatives. I support her on Patreon, becuase she gives the funds to her parents — who run a business in occupied Nova Kakhovka but have fled the region — and her parents use this to pay the wages of their employees who are obviously out of work due to the war and occupation.

I'd also like to open up this post for other people to share links of their own. They can be either in support of Ukraine, or in support of another cause. I ask for two things when sharing:

1. I cannot vet everything you share, so please ensure that you've scrutinised it thoroughly — it should be something you've either given your money to in the past, or would be comfortable giving your own money.
2. Please provide context for what this organisation or individual funds. If they're for something unrelated to Ukraine, please specify the country (and, if relevant, region). Basically, 'this organisation campaigns for reproductive rights' is too vague, 'this organisation campaigns for reproductive rights in NAME OF STATE, in the United States, where abortion has just been banned' gives the needed context.

I will make a top-level comment for Ukraine-related, and non-Ukraine-related organisations, and link those comments in this post. Please post your own links under the relevant comment so it's easier for other people to view them. Any comments that aren't links to charities can be made as normal.

Edited to add:

Top-level comment for posting links to organisations/individuals helping Ukraine

Top-level comment for posting links to organisations unrelated to Ukraine

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

dolorosa_12

Please post links to organisations or individuals helping Ukraine.

From:

ambyr

Please let me know if these aren’t in the spirit of what you’re looking for.

For financial contributions, I have been donating to World Central Kitchen, a DC-based charity that provides hot meals to people experiencing humanitarian crises. In Ukraine they work closely with local restaurants and farmers, so they both feed people and put money back into the economy. They are also simultaneously working in Afghanistan and other hotspots, and you cannot specify which crisis you want your money to go to, so I wasn’t sure which thread to post this in, but Ukraine is the major focus of their hunger relief efforts at present.

From:

dolorosa_12

World Central Kitchen is definitely exactly the sort of thing I'm looking for. I've been following their efforts in Ukraine and have been incredibly impressed, specifically for the reasons you mention (i.e. that they work with locals so that money flows back into the economy). I think the fact that they're operating in Ukraine means that this is the right thread for them, but if you want to duplicate in the non-Ukrainian organisations thread, I don't mind.

From:

ambyr

This is not a charitable thing, but an online acquaintance lives near Odessa (his family has evacuated to Germany). His primary living at the moment is through his Etsy store, which sells puzzles that he designs and has manufactured by a company in Ivano-Frankivsk (western Ukraine). The boxes are made in a separate factory in Kyiv, Ukraine. So . . . basically all money spent on his product goes into the Ukrainian economy. It’s been difficult keeping the business going—for a while the box factory in Kyiv was closed due to shelling and he was shipping product in plain corrugated cardboard, and of course the reliability of the mail has varied wildly. But at the moment he’s solidly able to get things to Europe and the US in about two weeks, and I’d love to keep him in business/keep up his hopes. And they’re nice puzzles.

I have no reason to believe he’s any more deserving than any other Ukrainian artisan, mind. But he’s the one I know, and as you say, you have to pick a sliver of a cause to focus on.

From:

chestnut_pod

Project Kesher is a Jewish NGO that provides educational and medical support to women and girls throughout Eastern Europe. It currently has a large campaign that is Ukraine-specific.

Current health-related funding priorities for Project Kesher Ukraine, as listed on the website, include providing menstrual products and other sanitary products such as adult diapers, prenatal vitamins and umbilical cord care kits, and baby-care products like diapers and formula. Other projects include funding and educational support for Jewish girls preparing for their b'not mitzvah, in order to maintain continuity of Ukrainian Jewish life, and the redirection of an existing loan program to specifically support female small business owners in Ukraine, to plough money back into the Ukrainian economy. The full list of projects is available here.

A note: sister organization Project Kesher Israel also exists and is directing funds towards supporting Ukrainian refugees in Israel. The two are organizationally linked. If you are concerned about your money potentially going to Israel in any way, you may read about the relations and funding allocations between different PKs in the annual reports. I myself am comfortable donating to the Ukraine emergency fund, which I estimate can provide targeted support thanks to a grassroots community network of long-standing trust within Ukraine, and because of their approach to stimulating diaspora life in Eastern Europe through education.

From:

dolorosa_12

Please post links to organisations supporting non-Ukrainian causes here.

From:

lilysea

Mermaids is a British charity and advocacy organisation that supports gender variant and transgender youth. They also provide inclusion and diversity training.

They have been helping gender-diverse kids, young people and their families since 1995

They are a nonprofit advocacy organisation

They are one of the leading groups fighting British transphobia at the moment

https://mermaidsuk.org.uk/

From:

lilysea

United to Beat Malaria:

"Since 2006, United to Beat Malaria has helped protect over 39 million people from malaria across 57 countries and raised over $74 million in the fight to end malaria.

Our malaria projects continue to prioritize young children and mothers, pregnant women, refugees and internally-displaced persons, hard-to-reach communities with little to no healthcare access, and frontline health workers who fight malaria in these communities."

2021: YEAR IN REVIEW
1,298,117 People Protected

We helped provide:

150,720 bed nets

460,650 anti-malarial treatments, including 200,573 preventative treatments for pregnant women

147,325 rapid diagnostic tests

70,174 homes protected through an indoor residual spraying campaign

1,045 disinfection kits to 100 health facilities to ensure safe provision of essential health services, including malaria care, during COVID-19

566 health workers and lab technicians trained

https://beatmalaria.org/our-impact/

From:

chestnut_pod

Project Rozana is a multi-faith medical charity that operates in Palestine and Israel to provide Palestinians, especially children, with life-saving medical care. Their best-known project is Wheels of Hope, in which volunteer ambulance drivers transport patients through checkpoints to and from Israeli hospitals.

Other programs include specialist nurse training courses for nurses in East Jerusalem, a binational school for training trauma-informed child psychologists to work in Palestine, and women's health initiatives in the West Bank. A fuller list can be found here, and regular newsletters discuss the newest programs, like a telehealth clinic for Palestinian patients with cardio-thoracic and renal diseases and cancer.

The organization both answers immediate care needs within the existing system and works to build and fortify a functioning healthcare structure within Palestine through medical training and funding of community initiatives.

From:

lirazel

I'll draw people's attention to The Bail Project, which combats USAmerican mass incarceration through a revolving bail fund. They also provide community support to the people who are out on bail, making sure that, for instance, those people have a ride to their court dates and other practicalities that, when unmet, keep people entangled in the "criminal justice" system for years.

I personally know both people who work for and have been helped by its Louisville, Kentucky branch, but it does work in cities throughout the country, especially in cities that have large Black populations.

Warning for some flashing on the video on the website in the link. I'll be in touch with them to ask them to change that.

From:

spikedluv

It's strange how little we hear about this, even when I listen to my local NPR station, unless something horrid is happening. I appreciate the reminder that not only is it happening, they can still use aid.

From:

dolorosa_12

I'm glad the reminder was helpful — and yes, they definitely still need aid. In a military sense they are a small, poor country, fighting a World War II-style invasion from a superpower, and although they're getting a lot of help in this regard from the US and Europe, the fact still remains that justice and courage are not enough against what is essentially an arsenal that has been built up since the 1950s without pause (there was a period in June when Ukraine literally ran out of ammunition and were trying to fight without it). In a humanitarian/economic sense, again, they were a poor country to begin with, their economy has collapsed and they are having to cope with millions of unemployed internally displaced people fleeing to the western side of the country (all of whom need to be fed and housed), no money coming in from taxes, having to pay the salaries of all their military, a blockade which is preventing them from exporting the things on which their economy has depended, and a complete humanitarian catastrophe in both the occupied and frontline areas.

It's interesting that it's completely fallen from the front pages in the US. It's not quite that bad in Europe, but I guess that's because it's happening in our neighbourhood, and it's obvious here that the war's outcome is going to have really profound political consequences for our region (as well as short-term consequences like Russia deliberately causing an economic crisis with the cost of gas and oil).

From:

muccamukk

Thanks for putting this together! I heard on the news yesterday that donations were down, but hadn't gotten to the research for who to give to.

From:

dolorosa_12

I'm glad it was helpful! Obviously please don't take my word on any of these organisations — as I've said several times, people need to be informed about where their money is going, and confident that it's going to appropriate causes.

From:

oracne

Thanks for these links.

From:

dolorosa_12

You're welcome! I'm glad they were helpful.

From:

lynn82md

Razom for Ukraine: They have been around since Putin invaded Crimea in 2014. I donated to them for my birthday and had them as my fundraiser for people to donate to. I had reached over my goal with donations.
https://razomforukraine.org

The local store had people donate some food, toilet stuff, stuff for babies too initially for like a month when it first got invaded in February. I also made sure to donate some food for vegetarians and vegans as well.