By Tamar Jacoby, Director of the New Ukraine Project
Following a wave of Russian attacks, there was no electricity in Kyiv’s Obolonskyi district administration building—essentially a neighborhood town hall—on the day the local council was formed. I had come to Kyiv to explore how the democratic reforms and nation-building so vibrant in Ukraine before the Russian invasion were faring in wartime; this was my first stop. Some three dozen nonprofit volunteers, legal aid lawyers, municipal officials, and people displaced from their homes in other parts of Ukraine—what experts call internally displaced persons or IDPs—sat in the dark in the ornate Soviet-era meeting hall. The wan winter sunshine filtering in past brocade curtains barely cast enough light to see by, but the activists didn’t seem to notice—they were so excited to be moving forward.
This ad hoc coalition of city officials and civil society advocates had gathered to talk about the needs of the estimated 30,000 IDPs who had settled in Obolon in the year since the Russian invasion. Their vision for the “IDP Council” they were launching: that activists would collect information about the migrants’ needs, and government would use it to tailor more effective services. The nonprofit organization spearheading the project, Charity Foundation Stabilization Support Services, was providing humanitarian aid to displaced people across Ukraine. The group says that it has distributed food and other basic supplies to more than 300,000 internal migrants since last February. But this was different, a step up the food chain—humanitarian help combined with grassroots democracy building. The new council’s motto: “Nothing about IDPs without IDPs.”
