Putting Down Roots in a new Community
In spring 2026, through the Ukraine Community Resilience Fund, The BEARR Trust supported the Centre for Strategic Initiatives in western Ukraine to distribute 230 boxes of seed packets to families with several children living in rural villages and towns across the Khmelnytskyi oblast.
Each box contained 17 packets of vegetable seeds (carrots, cucumbers, beans, peas, maize, pumpkins) for families who rely on their land to put food on the table. The boxes reached 230 families in three communities: Lenkivtsi, Dunayivtsi, and Kytaihorod. Rotary District 1100, which covers parts of western England and south-east Wales, co-funded the project, contributing blackcurrant bushes distributed alongside the seed boxes.
The project builds on earlier work that the Centre for Strategic Initiatives began after the full-scale invasion of 2022, when Khmelnytskyi absorbed large numbers of internally displaced people from eastern and southern Ukraine. Many were dispersed into small villages: communities with little infrastructure and limited resources, far from the cities they had left behind.
At the BEARR’s Community Resilience Fund anniversary webinar in May 2026 Nataliya Shmurikova, Head of the Board of the Centre for Strategic Initiatives, described the challenges of this adaptation from urban to rural living:
“It was like going from one stress to another. For most of them, their places of living were destroyed. They had nowhere to return.”
In that context, packets of seeds and gardening tools were more than practical gifts. They helped people put down roots in communities where they had been strangers and to stay.
