Campaign Complete: support our ongoing campaigns helping frontline communities.

During the first days of the full-scale invasion, our founder Ryan asked a friend where to find refugees who needed help. The closest place was a converted shopping mall, where more than 500 people were gathered. He put on his high-visibility vest which had become the way to separate volunteers from refugees, Googled how to write Vienna in Ukrainian, and walked around with a sign through a sea of children, women, and pets. There he met a mother and daughter, Olga and Anastasia. After a speakerphone call to a Ukrainian friend who could translate and vouch for him, they set off on a 10-hour drive back home. Olga and Anastasia had each a small backpack, had been on the move for three days, and so understandably slept the whole way.

This was just the beginning. In March, the busiest month, he was active in more than a dozen groups every waking hour, every day, matching drivers, accommodations, funding the fuel for trips, and generally doing everything he could to get people—volunteers and refugees alike—out of tough spots, as quickly as possible.

The work ranged broadly: picking up driving “shifts“, helping with routing for drivers, intervening in border and customs issues, funding emergencies (a hotel room for 45 people after a bus failure), getting people out of harm‘s way when in abusive or suspected human trafficking cases (we would go on to create our own investigation group for this, working with police).

As they got rolling and moving people increasingly in vans and buses, and more easily finding housing, he decided to focus his “people“ interventions on the refugee groups that were having a harder time. He drove mainly disabled or wounded refugees and found initiatives that were supporting People of Colour, LGBTQ, and Roma refugees. With his new buddy Steve, a Ghanaian soccer coach in Budapest, they created a shelter for Africans fleeing Ukraine and processed over a 1,000 souls through it, mostly traveling on to new horizons in Europe. In Bucharest, LGBTQ activists self-funded a shelter with the €800 they had between them—by topping them up with €3,000, they were able to help hundreds of people get to safety and spend a night or two in Romania in safety after exhausting, days-long journeys in Ukraine.

While this campaign has ended, the spirit that drove it continues. Check out our other campaigns to help Ukrainians to respond and rebuild.