Having got his first pension years ago, Kyiv resident Lev Kudriavtsev was surprised how little he could afford for such a modest amount of money. Kudriavtsev, now 89, says it is practically impossible to live on less than Hr 2,000 a month.
In Ukraine, where the cost of living is much higher than a minimum pension payment, which was Hr 1,497 as of December 2018, thousands of retirees all over the country are pushed into poverty and are left to cope with it themselves.
However, some retirees are lucky to get additional aid, only not from the government — pensioners in Kyiv and Dnipro, a city of 1 million people some 470 kilometers southeast from Kyiv, can receive free packages with food and hygiene products from Starenki, the Kyiv-based charitable foundation.
Since its establishment in 2015, Starenki (meaning seniors in English) has grown from a local initiative to a charitable foundation that has already handed around 4,500 packages with food and hygiene products to nearly 2,000 of Ukrainian retirees who receive the minimum pension and who have no relatives left to take care of them.
Kudriavtsev, who has already received three aid packages from Starenki, says that even though this help cannot fully cover all of his needs, he is still incredibly grateful for it.
“They (Starenki) prolong our lives,” Kudriavtsev told the Kyiv Post.
Helping seniors
The co-founder of Starenki, Iryna Baranenko, 32, says she has always been donating money to seniors in need, but when she moved to Kyiv from Donetsk in 2015 because of Russia’s war on Ukraine, she decided that her small donations were not enough.
As she was not able to find any charitable foundations to help retirees, Baranenko decided to set one up herself.
“I was thinking how many people I could help myself. It could be only one retiree per month that I meet at a grocery store or on the street,” Baranenko says.
Eventually, Baranenko, together with four other women, all with different occupations and backgrounds, co-founded the Starenki initiative to support Ukrainian retirees in need.
The charitable foundation’s aid packages include some basic products like oil, several types of cereals, canned meat and fish, hygiene products and sweets. Other than that, Starenki recently decided to put energy saving light bulbs to help seniors save some money on electricity payments.
Each of the food packages weighs nearly eight kilograms, and costs from Hr 300–450 ($11–16).
“We see it as a supplement to pension payments, which provides seniors with some additional resources so they can buy something they really need but cannot afford, or buy medicine,” Baranenko says.
Right after the establishment of Starenki its co-founders delivered the aid themselves, but nowadays the foundation has about 60 volunteers who regularly help with deliveries, as well as a community of nearly 450 volunteers in both cities.
Apart from that, the foundation is looking for new people to join their teams, in order to be able to provide more seniors with their aid.
“Physically, it’s very difficult for us to support all of the retirees in Kyiv, and we are very dependent on our volunteers,” Baranenko says.
Initially, Starenki`s volunteers visited retirees only once every three months, but nowadays they deliver aid almost every day, as people have begun to donate more money, providing the foundation the opportunity to give help to more people daily.
Starenki regularly publishes reports of its spending to its official website and Facebook account, as according to Baranenko it is important that everything is transparent.
“This is a strict rule for all of the project’s co-founders — to have no financial benefit from this project,” Baranenko says.
Happy retirement
Another co-founder of Starenki, Anna Vereschak, 31, says they aimed to find pensioners who really need their help, but that at the beginning of the project it was unclear how they would find these people.
“Those who really need help they rarely go out, and they are mostly shy (about being in need). They don’t go begging, as many of them were teachers and engineers, but now they are ashamed,” Vereschak told the Kyiv Post.
Therefore, the charitable foundation decided to cooperate with local social services centers in Kyiv and Dnipro, which help the foundation find pensioners to help.
To help retirees feel happier and to entertain them, Starenki also arranges meetings every two weeks at which seniors can enjoy live music shows, eat some sweets and chat with each other.
“We give them an opportunity to communicate,” Baranenko says.
Apart from food aid and meetings for retirees, the co-founders of Starenki urge people to take care of pensioners who live in their neighborhoods as “these people are in actual need now,” Baranenko says.
According to Vereschak, they see retirees in tears quite often as they deliver aid.
“It is tough to see seniors who cry when we bring them food, as they should get it easily, they deserve a proper retirement and a proper life,” Vereshchak says.
“They cry when we bring them some macaroni and buckwheat, and this is so sad,” Vereschak says.
Starenki’s co-founders also share the idea that a happy retirement depends not only on the size of a pension payment, as they promote the idea that people should get ready to become older, lead a healthy lifestyle and make some savings.
“Yes, pension payments are important. However, it is not the only thing that can make the quality of life at this age a little better,” Baranenko says.
Baranenko also says that in Ukraine pensioners seem to be excluded from society, as they mostly spend time at their homes, feeling sick and lonely.
“We dream that one fine day everything becomes so good in our system, in our society, that there is no need for us. This is our goal”, Baranenko says.
