Nonprofit Helps Families Find Home in the Midst of War in Ukraine

Soon after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the humanitarian nonprofit Community Organized Relief Effort began providing emergency aid to people displaced by the fighting. That meant providing food, toiletries, mattresses, and other supplies in shelters located in school gymnasiums, usually housing hundreds of people.

“It was women, kids, elderly people, animals,” says Liana Khorovytska, CORE’s Ukraine country director. “They could have only one bed for the whole family, and all their belongings were in the pile.”

The organization has worked to improve conditions. It put up walls between the beds, constructed more toilets and showers, and brought in washing machines. But they were still temporary measures.

Four months into the war, CORE started a rental-assistance program in the Lviv region, in western Ukraine, to help the most vulnerable people in the shelters move into apartments. The program, which focuses on families, elderly people, and people with disabilities, pays rent and utilities for six months.

Khorovytska says being in their own apartments helps people focus on finding work and enrolling their children in school. It also allows them to save some money as they try to rebuild their lives. And in the midst of the war, she says, it gives people some measure of normalcy.

The program faces twin challenges, Khorovytska says: Far more people need assistance than CORE can help, and there are fewer apartments in the Lviv area than people who want to rent. Still, the program has provided rental assistance to 540 households — roughly 2,000 people so far.

CORE continues to provide critical emergency aid in Ukraine, and with Russia’s recent counteroffensive in Donetsk and Kharkiv, the number of people being displaced is growing once again. Khorovytska wants people in other countries to know that the war rages on, even if they don’t hear about it as much as they once did.

“We unfortunately are getting used to the conditions that we are living in, but no one should get used to such a condition — when you’re going to the bomb shelter at night, when you’re afraid about your kids, that they’re in school and will the bomb hit or not,” she says. “This stress is constant.”