Our CEO Mark Waddington has been visiting our teams in Ukraine to understand their progress with our strategy, and its impact on children. Here, he speaks with Alevtyna Zhembotska, a Regional Project Manager for Hope and Homes for Children in the Kyiv Oblast.
Hi Alevtyna, we first met in April 2022, shortly after the full-scale invasion, when you had just joined Hope and Homes for Children. Like several of our colleagues, you had endured the terrifying occupation of Russian soldiers.
Yes, it was a time that I will never forget. We found ourselves in the epicentre of the war: hiding in basements without food, water, heat, or medicine, sharing our last resources just to survive. Neighbours were tortured and beaten. More than 450 people were murdered across Bucha District, and many of us had things stolen and looted. All of my colleagues, here in Kyiv Region and over in Dnipro, have their own experiences of what happened to them and their families since the war of aggression started. Somehow this terrible thing brings us all together.
What motivated you to join Hope and Homes for Children?
Surviving the occupation felt like a miracle. There were times when I did not think I would. I couldn’t join the armed forces because of my age, but I wanted to do something useful that supported Ukraine to achieve victory. I had known HHC since 1998 – in fact, I worked in the Department of Youth and Child Protection, and knew Halya and Nadiia. I had worked with them on the stateside in partnership with HHC to help pioneer and establish group fostering in Kyiv region. So when I got the call from Nadiaa in April 2022 – “Alevtyna, can you join us?” – I was in.
What part of your work fulfils or inspires you?
It’s the transformation of families that receive our support. It is actually visible. You can see it in the faces of children and parents, especially the emergency support we provide for internally displaced families who are in terrible need, especially now the fighting and attacks are intensifying. Many of them were only carrying plastic bags with just a few of their possessions. They were really left with nothing. Not even the photographs of their loved ones. And most of them were so disoriented.
It’s when we go beyond the immediate crisis response of food and accommodation, though, that we have our most profound impact. When we are working more deeply with families and children, preventing babies from being taken from their mothers to refill institutions – and this is happening still! – getting at the reasons why they are so vulnerable to separation, and helping them to resolve those problems – that’s when it is most satisfying.
Even now, the staff in baby institutions tell us every day that we will never find families for the children there. That only motivates us more. We make calls night and day throughout the communities we are operating in. We have built up a lot of trust and a lot of connections, and so we target those families where older children are moving out to go onto college or university, or into work, to see if they would be willing to foster a baby. Of course, we are very targeted. The families we work with need to be able and willing to take on this responsibility, and open to the training and support they will require. Fostering a child is very different to having a child of your own.
I feel a great sense of responsibility when we take on the most challenging cases, especially those involving children with severe disabilities who face injustice and discrimination. Helping such families to become truly integrated into their communities is a wonderful feeling.
What challenges are you facing in Kyiv Region?
Families are getting poorer. We are approaching the winter and the enemy is increasing its aggression by attacking our energy infrastructure. Some people are going to freeze. Do you know that it can cost half a month’s salary, sometimes more, just for the fuelwood needed to heat a house in the communities in Kyiv region?
As an organisation we only have finite resources. We are trying to involve other NGOs in providing help to the families who need it, but the problem is that the number of other organisations has decreased. Most of them in the Kyiv region have left us. So we are providing training for local authority specialists to help them reach more families, and deliver more effective support to them.
Another challenge we face is the imbalance in the number of foster families that are ready to take children in, and the number of children needing that kind of care. When we are working to prevent children from going into institutions, or transitioning them back into families it is really difficult. We call it “hunting for families”.
One reason it can be tough is because the legal system is obviously struggling in the circumstances, and so is very slow in awarding the status to children that allows us to place them in a family. This allows institutions to capture those children in the system. Court dates are frequently postponed. We are finding ways through this by getting Special Orders to make temporary placements of children in families, but even this is difficult, and it is not ideal because short-term, temporary placements as an on-going way of providing care is not in the best interests of children. They need stable, secure placements in which the real care and love of being in a family has the chance to flourish.
There are some communities though in which there are no services at all to support children and families. As the cost of living gets worse, with allowances and payments to foster families often getting log-jammed in the system, and with so many men on the frontline not being able to help, families are especially vulnerable in these locations. It’s really tough.
What is the positive difference you hope HHC can make in Kyiv Region?
I don’t want to see any institutions anywhere in the region. I want all children living in families. If we can continue to strengthen prevention services across all the districts in the region, we have a really good chance of achieving this. Unlike the other organisations that came and went, we need to be in for the long term. This is what I love about HHC. We have colleagues here in Ukraine and colleagues there in the UK all working on this objective, and not giving. Together we will succeed.
How can we use the impact we are having in Kyiv Region to support progress nationally?
Among many of the things we are doing in the region, we are piloting two really important projects. The first is the support services for family care we have designed and are helping to implement for families, and the second is the centre for rehabilitation of children with disabilities here in Bucha.
The success of these projects will help us to secure commitments in legislation to roll them out nationally, while also demonstrating how this can be done – push-pull! We are recording the practice and expertise we are developing alongside this advocacy and I am confident that we will succeed in having a national impact. Although we are meeting resistance still, commitment to what we are trying to achieve really is growing across the country. And we have allies nationally as well as in regions like Dnipropretrovsk.
Most importantly, we are showing how communities, with the right support, can come together in partnership with organisations like HCC and their local authorities to strengthen cohesion and find their own solutions to the social and care challenges they face. This is when the magic happens.
Alevtyna, you’ve been really generous with your insights, which are so inspiring. Thank you. One more question: how do you relax?
My husband’s hobby is to gather mushrooms. I can’t stand doing it! But it gets me into the forest and back to nature. Being around trees is so calming for me. I have fir trees in my garden. I have my cats of course, and they all have very different personalities. They don’t live with me, I live with them. I like listening to rock music too.
Now you’ve said that, I have to ask you what your favourite band is!
High five!
