February 13, 2026

Grants under the Community Resilience Fund are mainly focused on mental health and community resilience projects. However BEARR is acutely aware that in some places, especially frontline regions, the physical situation is so dire this winter that organisations there may have more immediate priorities. We consulted one such organisation about the various difficulties they face. Here is their thoughtful reply:

“Thank you very much for your support. Winter, indeed, is very difficult and our families don’t just go through it. Of the material needs, we need: powerful charging stations for autonomous operation in the event of a power outage; gasoline for refuelling the generators; children in the family need powerful power banks. But the situation in Kherson is more difficult than in other cities, because we are under constant shelling, and this very much destroys the psyche of our people. The people of Kherson lived without electricity, water, and gas for almost two months in the winter of 2022-2023 after de-occupation, and we can physically survive in such conditions.

For me, as a person who has been working with such children and families for 16 years, their moral condition is very important. The behaviour of the Kherson people is characterised by persistence and endurance. It’s like the flu for a person who has been cured of cancer, you know? We experienced the worst: the brutal Russian occupation; most of my families lost their homes and live under other people’s roofs (I am one of them). Yes, we have a difficult humanitarian situation, but people need to be turned away from the topics of grief and death and turned to life, and this is within the power only of professional psychologists, and such a problem cannot be solved in one session.

Now, precisely in Kherson, it is important for people to have inner strength that they can rely on in order to continue living by themselves and drag themselves into life, and not just for the survival of their unhealthy children. After four months, teenagers who physically attended school only in the 1st and 2nd grades will finish 9th grade. All the rest of the years, they studied at home without communication, without relationships, without experience of growing up among their peers, and dreams also need to be worked on, they need to learn the skills of communication and coexistence with their peers.

Since February 2022, our women-mothers have lost: an additional job for retirement in order to have more means to survive (now the disability allowance for a child in Ukraine is £45, and the prices are practically European); the opportunity to fully rehabilitate their children; husbands left the families who either fought or died… In half of the families in the occupation on the Dnieper bank occupied by the Russians, their elderly parents were left behind and there is no way to communicate with them, it is not possible to help them or receive support from them, and only the Kherson people understand this. And at the same time, they lose interest in continuing life, stop seeing a future and the meaning in it, and this is a feature of those regions that are on the front line.

And it is precisely with this that we have the biggest problem: specialists cannot do quality work without payment for their work, and the big programmes do not extend to the frontline regions. I constantly monitor grant programmes and proposals and, alas, I do not find funding for the Kherson region. I turned to the BEARR Trust for help because we have experience in receiving your help and we are not new to your foundation. Please forgive me for the confusion of my thoughts. Probably, this is an opportunity for me to speak out and explain everything to a person who is really interested. I feel your engagement. A huge thank you from our 56 families that you think of us.”

BEARR has agreed to some flexibility in use of the grant to allow for some diversion of funds to immediate requirements if necessary, for example for emergency heating etc.