Project Report: Stronger Together: How Creativity and Mutual Support bring people together
SGS 2024 Grantee: Tvory Dobropillia, with Age of Happiness, Ukraine
Project: Enabling displaced women and elderly people to integrate into their new communities.
Despite fatigue and anxious challenges, Ukrainians continue to find ways to be together and help one another. From August to December 2024, with the support of the BEARR Trust, three public organisations from Donetsk initiated the project “Women Care,” aimed at helping displaced women and elderly people who had lost their homes a chance to feel part of new communities.
The project covered the Dobropillia, Sloviansk (Donetsk oblast), and Kropyvnytskyi (Kyrovohrad oblast) communities, where we held creative meetings, workshops, psychological support groups, and body-oriented practices—all to allow people to express their potential and find inner resilience. The events brought together 305 participants across three cities.
Nadiia, a displaced person from Bakhmut, left her native home and settled in Dobropillia. She lived alone, but the meetings organised within the framework of the project allowed her to find like-minded people. She discovered opportunities she had not known about before and regained a sense of belonging to society.
Daria, a 13-year-old girl, lost the ability to participate in group activities and creative classes at the start of the war. However, thanks to the “Women Care” project, she was able not only to learn new things but also to meet interesting people, replenish her emotional reserves, and appreciate the importance of social interaction again.
Participants in our events practiced storytelling, made soap by hand, created traditional Ukrainian dolls, and attended yoga classes. They crafted traditional Ukrainian beaded ornaments and experimented with unconventional ones. They explored their potential in painting and neurography lessons, composed poems, played musical instruments for the first time, and even improved their psychological state through dance therapy. They learned to bake a cake using a unique recipe and discovered 20 ways to make dumplings. They became acquainted with metaphorical cards in sessions with psychologists, exploring themselves through their emotions and thoughts. Most importantly, they were together, in a group, communicating and restoring their inner peace.
This project became an important step towards solidarity and the creation of new social connections. People once again felt like part of a community. As a result, the collaboration has evolved into a long-term partnership between the CSOs and the regional administration aimed at restoring social connections and a sense of community among IDPs who have fled the war, sometimes for the second or third time.
Photos by Kateryna Chala
Contact
Maryna Kucherenko
Tvory Dobropillia
Donetsk, Ukraine
