Context
Funky Citizens is, since 2012, an active organisation in the area of good governance and active citizenship, an NGO promoting values such as transparency and the rule of law. Even though humanitarian help is not one of our main areas of activity, the agility and the requests for help which came towards us, motivated the team to contribute effectively and quickly to help as many Ukrainians as possible.
What can we do best in the Ukrainian crisis?
We are agile and we function as a kind of a relay - we connect people and resources. Thanks to our 10 year experience NGO field, it was easy for us to collaborate with our guild colleagues and particularly with the private sector in order to quickly mobilize the resources for the Ukrainians who are fleeing the war.
What can we do to #helpUkraine?
We juggled on 4 levels. From the very first week, we did:
- advocacy: pressured authorities to organize, we demanded transparency and have appealed to responsibility in order to diminish the risk of the emergence of human trafficking
- transport: we responded to our partners appeal from The Republic of Moldova and we raised funds in order to pay the buses on the route Palanca (The Republic of Moldova, border city, 60km away from Odessa) - Bucharest or Palanca - Iaşi, alongside Declic and Mai Bine, proceeding to transport in this way approximately 3000 people towards safer places. Subsequently, we handed over the baton towards a corridor that settled meanwhile by the authorities. We still help continuously, in a punctual manner and at the request of our partners, focusing on people with disabilities. Additionally, we tried to help as much as possible with covering the necessary costs for booking train tickets at the Bucharest North Railway Station.
- the platform: after we were contacted by the American NGO CORE (owing to our appearance at CNN), we have provided them the institutional platform for helping them to further help out in Romania. Therefore, in partnership with them, we are working on delivering medical supplies and products (food, sanitary products, clothes etc.) in cities from Ukraine. Our focus is on Odessa right now.
- volunteering: from transporting the refugees, to finding accommodations, to editing guides such as the one from www.ajutamucraina.infowe undertook a lot of small activities which gathered, put us to the test, but we are glad that we could contribute in the least.
A few of the supplies that made it to Ukraine last week and will help those in the Nikolaev region.
Financial transparency: so far, we managed to raise and spend over 100,000 USD from donations and grants from the people and the organisations that trust us. All of them went especially to the transportation, but also to humanitarian help and other small forms of support that were needed immediately. Thank you for helping us to help! We are still available to do what we think that we can do better than others, namely to use our personal network in order to help ensure that the humanitarian help resources are not wasted and that they are arriving where it is needed the most.
You can further donate either by PayPal
or directly into our bank account: RO07INGB0000999903156486
Don't forget to mention that the donation is for helping out those in Ukraine.
