March 7, 2022

Thank you for your overwhelmingly generous support for The BEARR Trust Ukraine appeal.

Thank you for your overwhelmingly generous support for The BEARR Trust Ukraine appeal. In its first week, we raised over £90,000, including donations received separately from our CAF Donate site.

The money is being sent quickly by a team of BEARR trustees to local organisations we already know from our Small Grants Scheme and the conference we ran in Lviv in 2016. Almost half the funds raised so far will have been sent by this evening, and payments will continue for as long as possible. Two of our trustees will be working in Moldova from Wednesday.

We are receiving almost instant reports and photos from local organisations who are using this money. They have bought food, blankets, medical supplies and petrol for transport. We are being told that BEARR’s money is arriving ahead of international aid, and is therefore a lifeline. Some has been distributed further to towns under attack, and an increasing amount is being used to support refugees arriving in Moldova. We expect there will always be a need to plug gaps and to coordinate local efforts, which is where our local partners are playing an important role.

Please continue to spread the word about the appeal as we move into the second week of our response. Many of us had almost forgotten that the ‘E’ in BEARR’s name stood for ‘Emergency’. We are so sad that thirty years later, we are confronting an emergency of a very different kind.

Please contact info@bearr.org with any questions.

Warm wishes,
The BEARR Trust