With Ukraine joining the Giving Tuesday global charity movement, the country has started a new, national level charitable tradition.
Ukraine is the 154th country to join the movement, which is held annually on the fifth day after the U. S. Thanksgiving holiday. It was launched on Nov. 27 by four Ukrainian charity organizations that teamed up to get the new national movement going. In its inaugural year, 100 organizations in most of Ukraine’s oblasts carried out events — all with the aim of helping others.
“Our goal is to increase the communication and motivate enterprises, the authorities and everyone to do good deeds,” Kateryna Zagoriy, the initiator of the movement in Ukraine, told the Kyiv Post.
Giving Tuesday was founded in the United States in 2012 as a response to consumerism, and is traditionally held before the winter holiday season.
Zagoriy, also founder of Zagoriy Family Charitable Foundation, has been involved in charity work since 1998. Around four years ago, during a visit to the United States, she saw how Giving Tuesday worked and was inspired to do the same in Ukraine.
So she contacted 92nd Street Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association, the organization that founded Giving Tuesday in the United States, to find out about the requirements for officially becoming a part of the movement. These included engaging with charity organizations, establishing a coalition of such organizations as founding companies, and approving a founding memorandum.
To get the movement going, the Zagoriy Family Charitable Foundation teamed up with three charity organizations — the Club of Benefactors, Tabletochki and the Ukrainian Philanthropists Forum.
“We dreamed of Giving Tuesday being another day (in Ukraine) for doing good deeds,” Zagoriy said.
Events and participants
Starting from July, the Ukrainian team launched an information campaign about the upcoming Giving Tuesday: They put up outdoor advertising, wrote stories in partnership with online media, and held social ad screenings in four cities.
Financed by the Zagoriy Family Charitable Foundation, the Giving Tuesday team in Ukraine also created an online platform for organizations to register and add their events to the list of activities to be held on Nov. 27.
Eventually, over 100 participants registered — NGOs, companies, individuals and even schools from both small towns and large cities located in 23 of Ukraine’s 24 oblasts.
“We were glad that small towns like front-line Avdiyivka joined in,” Mariia Artemenko, the team leader of Giving Tuesday in Ukraine and founder of the Club of Benefactors, told the Kyiv Post.
Those who didn’t organize events but wanted to take part in Giving Tuesday could instead donate money, time (through volunteering) or talent (providing consulting services to organizations and businesses).
The organizers of activities came up with all kinds of fundraising events: charity auctions, movie nights and market fairs. Others took a more creative route, such as the Sova Jewelry House, which made a silver brooch with “Be a nice human” inscribed on it. The money raised from sales of the brooch are to be donated to the Tabletochki fund, which helps children with cancer.
The Giving Tuesday team said they had hundreds of meetings with those who wanted to participate. The team advised participants on what events they could hold and the best ways to organize them.
“We gave them a fishing rod rather than the fish,” Artemenko said.
The team leader of Giving Tuesday wanted to show everyone that it’s easy to help.
“Anyone can make a contribution,” she said.
Inspiring charity
One of the participating organizations, Let’s Help, which focuses on helping children and retirees, decided to hold the Let’s Help Babushkas flashmob on Giving Tuesday. “Babushkas” is Russian for “grannies.”
The flashmob encouraged people to buy food for elderly people when they visited grocery stores. They could also join the NGO’s team as a volunteer and spend a day at a store buying food for retirees using the organization’s money.
The founder of Let’s Help Olha Bondarenko says that many retirees in Ukraine live below the poverty line.
Today the minimum pension in Ukraine is Hr 1,435–1,452, which is why, Bondarenko says, retirees need financial support.
“These people are in despair, they don’t have (enough) food,” she said.
Although the fund is based in Kyiv, Ukrainians from all corners of the country participated in the flashmob after it was promoted on social media.
Bondarenko says people purchased at least 300 food packages for retirees on Giving Tuesday.
“Some of them (retirees) were crying,” she said. “It’s a very kind flashmob.”
Max Dzhabali, a consulting specialist that lives in Kyiv, found out about Let’s Help Babushkas from his mother, who encouraged him to participate. He said that together with his mother they looked for retired people in one of Kyiv’s supermarkets who were picking the cheapest products. They approached them and offered to buy them some food.
“I was touched by how little some elderly people needed. They were happy with help of Hr 80. It was the limit of their dreams to get some cookies and cheese, which they cannot typically afford,” Dzhabali said.
Artemenko believes good deeds not only help those in need, but also those who are providing help.
“Good deeds inspire” those that do them, she said.
