Agile Responses to the Ukrainian Humanitarian Crisis: The Power of Cell Phones

Salimah Samji Okay, welcome, everyone. We are excited to welcome you to The Building State Capability Talk Series and the title of our talk today is Agile Responses to the Ukrainian Humanitarian Crisis: The Power of Cell Phones. On February 24th this year, Russia invaded Ukraine and no one was prepared and thus unable to respond quickly. In today’s talk, you will hear how our panelists leveraged the networking power of cell phones to gather resources, organize people and mobilize hope. Our first speaker, Rita, will share how her organization mobilized to evacuate Ukrainians into Europe. Our second speaker, Zhenya, will share how he organized to help refugees who are stuck at the border in Tijuana. Our third set of speakers, Olga and her daughter Sasha, will share their experience volunteering with Ukrainian refugees in Germany. The way that we’re going to run this session is each of our panelists will first share their experiences, and then we’ll sit here in the front and take your questions. So without further ado, I’d like to welcome Rita to be able to share with us from her organization, Rubikus Guiding to safety. Rita, welcome. Let’s give her a round of applause.

Rita Vinokur Hi, everyone. I’m honored to be here. It’s my first time here and I’m so glad. Thank you so much for inviting me and having us. And I would love to tell you a little bit about Rubikus, the nonprofit international organization, which managed to bring lots of Ukrainians to Europe to safety. And I some questions for you. Could you please raise your hand if you own a cell phone? Ok, keep it up if you own a laptop. Great. If you have, like an hour or two of free time daily, just keep it up. If you have Internet access, just keep it there. Just look around. Actually, every single Rubikus volunteer is a person like you. Like, no any other skills or abilities needed. And that’s us. Rubikus is more than 150 people around the world, from South Korea to west coast of United States. And what we do, we help Ukrainian people, being ourselves at home, and we are basically guiding them to safety. Being in the safety of our house ourselves. And I really want to tell you how it all was created, how it all started, and how we managed to help not being really there in Ukraine or in Europe. So that’s the point of my speech. I believe many of you already know how many struggles the Ukrainian people went through since Russia invaded Ukraine. And today we are not talking about those terrible things. They are really well covered by media. I think we need more, we still need more coverage. But I really want to show you tiny bits of how we work and what we do to help them. Because I would say it’s pretty unique. And now when I’m looking at our organization, which is an international team, as I already told, working 100% remotely and just using our cell phones and our computers to help people. I would say it’s a unique experience to build this kind of organization, and I want to share it with you. We’ve managed to save more than 20,000 people. When I doubt myself, when I wake up in the morning and I have second thoughts, like if I’m doing the right thing, if what are we doing is enough, I just read this number out loud. Like, several times. I’m like, okay, we are good, we keep working. So that’s how I motivate myself. Because it’s kind of, I mean, this number is huge. I mean, I would never believe that people who never worked with war refugees could do that. But actually, actually, you can. You wake up in the morning, you start working, and at some point you achieve the goal. And how it all started, it started with a group of Russian speaking people from Europe who were organizing a nice little camp in Germany, like cultural event for Russian speaking families and their kids called Rubikus. That’s where the name comes from. And when the war began, everyone was shocked. Like everyone was trying to do something. What they’ve done, they just made three Google forms. For the refugees themselves, for the drivers who are willing to help them by driving them from the borders to some safe places, and for the hosts are willing to host them. That’s how it all started. Just one day. Three Google forms. Here we go. And they spread the word around. They tried to engage as many people who are willing to help. And they were trying to reach as many Ukrainians who were trying to flee the war zone and to escape and to find a safe place in Europe. And they would like technically match those in groups of three. One family of refugees, one driver and one host. Well, let’s make a guess. For how long could that go on? It took them a week to realize that they have way more refugees than drivers and hosts, which was pretty obvious. It was the very beginning of war and it was a very quick response. So they started waiting. They started waiting for the big guys to take over, like UNICEF, IOM, Red Cross, like whoever it is, someone big, someone who had like some initial funds and experience. They kept waiting and working, waiting and working. In months or so, they realized that the big guys are them, us I would say. Because some countries would respond better, some countries would still be kind of, you know, a big mess, like trying to figure out what to do. But actually, those people who started early, they became the experts. So when we would ask, like, who could maybe help us to bring that disabled lady from that place to the other one, they would tell us, oh, maybe we should ask Rubikus. There is an organization which knows better and they’re good and they’ve been doing that since the very beginning of the war. We’re like, okay, that’s us. And that’s how we started gaining the experience. We started gaining the experience from every single case we helped and we created like the whole knowledge, like, database, and we started putting things together. Actually, that’s how I started Rubikus, because after the first week of war, I joined the team as a knowledge keeper, and then I started teaching people how to deal with information. And then somehow I became a CEO of the company. So I don’t know how, but well, it happened sometime. And actually when we realized that no big guys are coming, we created this three step way to help people. They would still complete the form, the online form. And then the first person, the first responder, whom we would call operator would take the case and ask them couple of questions, like where are they from? Were are they going? Do they have any special needs? Disabled people? Animals? Little kids? elderly? Like all the question, like a triage. Like when you come to the hospital first you meet the nurse, the operator is our nurse. So the second person is a coordinator. In Ukrainian language, there is the word and the word is Kuma. Kuma is a godmother of your child. And it’s very important person in like every Ukrainian family. And Kuma is the most trusted person. Like the government could tell you this country stopped receiving refugees, but Kuma told you is a good place to go, you will go. Like seriously. So the idea is that our coordinator should become such Kuma for every family because that should be really like most trusted person for the whole way. Otherwise it won’t work. So the coordinator should establish a good contact with the family and should become like a very trusted person who can give advice, who can guide, who can help, who is able to answer all the questions, and then it will work. And that person would work through telegram chat with the family, sometimes phone calls, sometimes messengers, like all the resources they can use to establish the trust and then to guide them safely to their final destination. And of course, we all work remotely, but there are tons of local volunteers everywhere. Each country developed like the whole system of how they help the refugees. And one of our goals was to meet every local volunteer we possibly could and establish good contact and earn their trust and start cooperating. That’s how we can help the most vulnerable people who really need a supporting hand, like a physical hand. So we would arrange the chain of local volunteers meeting our families, feeding our families, providing them with some temporary accommodation on their way and so on. So that’s the chain. Every single one of our people, of our coordinators, of our operators, they would have some special superpowers. And I believe, every person here in this room, you have those kind of powers, but they just need to be discovered. That’s what I would tell to the very new volunteers who would come and ask if they may volunteer in Rubikus. That all of you have superpowers, all of you have something to offer. For example, Sveta from London, she’s the co-director. We like two directors. She’s the COO, I’m the CEO, but it doesn’t matter actually. We run it together. So her superpower is connections. If Sveta writes something on Facebook, in 2 hours, she’ll get the person at that particular country who could help. She would write, we have a person, like disabled lady with three cats, two kids, and one newborn grandchild, and we need someone to drive them from that place to this one. In a couple of hours, she’ll find someone through her network. Or, for example, Hanna. Hanna is researcher. She accomplished her first hundred cases, drew that map, and she became our expert in roots. And she is now our consultant. If someone needs to figure how to get people from Georgia to Italy, they would just go to Hanna. They would just tell her that they face that problem and they need to save some money and find the cheapest route from that place to that one. And she would just consult them because she’s a great researcher. I mean, she’s an actual biologist. She’s like doing cancer research. So that’s a super skill. Well, Kate from Thailand, who can handle 40 cases at the same time? She’s a stay at home mom. She has two kids. She knows a lot about multitasking. So she’s great. And she lives in Thailand, which is a great time zone, which means when everyone is really tired because on a peak we would have like 72 requests per day. So the Europe is asleep, America is falling asleep. We would have this chat for coordinators and we would need someone to cover the last ten cases no one took. She would come in and she would tell me, okay, give me everything you have left. And she would handle them til Europe wakes up. And then she can somehow distribute those cases between her colleagues if she couldn’t manage. But that’s the person with her superpower. Or Vlada, who is 18 year old Ukrainian refugee herself living in Germany. She’s our operator. She’s amazing because she knows the map. And when the person tells her, I’m from Kherson, she understands that we need to bring that person to Europe all the way through Russia, because otherwise this person won’t be able to cross the border, which is like artificially made because Russian army has invaded some of the parts and the other parts are under control of the Ukrainian army. So she would be the one who would tell everyone how to better evacuate the person from Ukraine. What’s my superpower? Well, I used to be a business coach. That’s me with the book I published when I was 30. Then I moved here to the United States and I became a stay at home mom in Pennsylvania. Little like a village. When the war started, I was devastated. I was trying to find some ways to help. I was trying to arrange some information of how to send the humanitarian aid, just how to do something. In a week, I was there at Rubikus. Because I know how to build systems. I know how to create business processes that work. So that’s my superpower. And the way we work is the system of telegram chats. And there are geographic chats, which means that every country has its own chat. We would have a couple of local experts. So if, for example, I’m guiding people from Ukraine through Poland and then Germany to Switzerland, I’ll just need to join the Polish chat, the German chat and a Swiss chat, talk to the experts, figure where the best place is for the temporary one night stays are, and how much the transportation and stuff like that. And also there are service chats. There are people there, same volunteers as us, who, for example, have credit cards with some time. So they would help us to book tickets. So if you need a train ticket as a volunteer, as a coordinator, you’ll need to stay in touch with the family. But the other volunteers will be able to help you to buy those tickets because you enter a special chat, you send them a request and you’ll get your tickets in like half an hour. And also would have chats with local volunteers. For example, the bus is coming and we have some people with several animals or kids on a bus, so they need special assistance. We would enter that chat and we would try the questionnaire and the local volunteers would respond. So that’s how the system works. And also all the volunteers who join the chats, they would soon become the experts. So they would give good advice to those who are new to this particular chat. And that’s how we are able to give people a supporting hand, even being away from them. Those are all examples of actual, how to say, like, little pieces we would send them like the maps, the guidelines, how to fly, for example. Some of them have been to the airport like never in their lives. They were born and raised in a small village next to Mariupol. They never flew on a plane, so they would need, like, guidelines. That’s exit, that’s entrance, that’s luggage. That’s how we do this and that. And some people would need a map how to get around and how to get to the hostel we rent for them. And so on and so on, so would spread those like little pieces one by one, not to overload them and to provide them with all the data needed. Translation would send them a little pieces of text to show at the cashier’s desk, to show at the airport, to show at the train station when they ask them for tickets. Like I’m Ukrainian refugee. I do not need a ticket because this convention covers me and I can go free. And that’s the link. So we would provide them with those like little screenshots they can show to the local authorities or maps like whatever they need, the coordinator will provide them with that information. For those who are still choosing, we’ve created a nice app. It’s an interactive website called Varenik. Varenik is a dumpling in Ukrainian, so Varenik is our little helper who would help people to figure what are the benefits in different countries for refugees so they can choose wisely? Because one of the main issues for people who are figuring if they need to leave now or later, if they need to go here or there, is lack of information. If you try to Google it, you’ll find lots of pages with how to donate, but not how to get to safety. So Varenik helps you to figure where to go and to compare different countries like accommodation advice, job opportunities wise, payments, and animals, and transportation like all, all the topics. So that’s what we do. And we do that for everyone who’s in Ukraine now or who’s been in Ukraine since the beginning of the war, wherever they are now, for example, they could have been already in Russia, but we would still help them if they left Ukraine after 24th of February. So we would help all the Ukrainians, no matter whether they are healthy or injured, could they pay for their own tickets or they have little or no money, thankful or not. Some people are not, and it’s also normal because I mean, they all are really stressed. Those people like no one else, they they didn’t deserve to be invaded, bombed, killed, injured. So those people are under a lot of stress. So we don’t ask questions. We don’t judge. We don’t do any filtration. We just help. And the thing, like for us is to pick our own fights, to help those people we feel like helping. Because I would honestly say that some of our coordinators would rather help an old lady than grown up men. Some people would take care of a family with five dogs. Some others would say, ok, it was their own choice. I’d better help a family with a tiny baby. Some people would tell, okay, we’re going to help these single men. Some people would say, no, he should go back to his country and to fight for it. And those questions are hard. That’s how people are getting burnt out. Because every day you ask those questions, should I help this person or that person? Should I ask, how much money do they have? Maybe they can handle it by themselves. Maybe I should find the way to put them in the right order. But those questions, I mean, everyone volunteer is a grown up person, and we volunteer because we feel like we are willing to help. And what I would usually say to everyone who is about to start volunteering, pick your fights. Find the people you really willing to help with all your heart. And the others? There are other people who are ready to help, there are other the grown ups who make their own decisions. And that’s what we do when I sort people and every family would find a volunteer coordinator which is ready to help them. The other thing is you ever think about joining the volunteering team, you should always get closure. You should always find a point in time and space to say, that’s it. It’s time to say goodbye. It’s time to say thank you. It’s time to wish us some good luck. And it’s time to transfer you to the caring hands of local volunteers. And now I should go and help the next family. And it’s a very important part, which we are working on. And that’s what I’m telling every single person who is starting to coordinate. And the one of the most important thing for us that I learned recently is it’s very important to think of your own feelings, not only feelings for those people you help. So if you ever think about helping others, just do not dismiss your own stress. Do not dismiss your own feelings. Do not dismiss something which could look very small, comparing to the devastation of the person who lost the part of the family or who was terribly injured. Your feelings matter. And that’s how you’ll keep going. And the very final words I would love to say. I would love to say thank you to our sponsors, to our donors. Those are two great organizations. It’s Nova Ukraine and it’s Cash for Refugees. Both are based in the U.S. and Nova Ukraine is the organization who sponsors our tickets, and Cash for Refugees provides all the refugees with a small amount of cash, which could help them to buy a suitcase and food for the baby or for the pets and like all those kind of expenses. But most of all, we are thankful to you, to just random people who would deny the cost of their cup of coffee or the meal prize or like whatever dearth of gifts to make bake sale, to organize like a little charity event that they work. And it helps a lot. I would say doubles the amount of money we get from the sponsors. It’s what we get from people. And we are really thankful. There are many of you here now and there are many of you watching us via Zoom. And I guess some of you would ask yourself a question, how could I help if I don’t speak any Russian and I cannot really coordinate the refugees and help them to get to safety in Europe? Like, what could I do? The best advice would be to start your own project, whatever it is. It doesn’t mean you need to bring someone to safety. You can teach someone English. You can help someone to get around in their new country, new environment. You can help someone with paperwork, like whatever you feel like doing you remember, pick your own fights, or if you want to spread the word about Rubikus. We do have our social networks, we do have Facebook, we do have Instagram, Telegram. So just sharing our posts, raising awareness, that’s important, that’s what we are looking for. And of course, you may help us to fundraise. You can organize a little event here and there. You can donate yourself. I brought some nice Christmas cards with me they are over there on that far away table. And the local artist, she is a Bostonian artist Marina Robin. She drew this wonderful picture for us. So you may always make a donation and grab a couple of those cards and then send them to your loved ones. On the back side, there is a QR code to our website, so your loved ones could also make a donation or send a card to the person they would love to share this information with. So that’s a little way to help us. Thank you so much. I think I gave you a little bit like an overview and I’ll be ready to answer any questions. So now it’s time for Zhenya I guess.

Zhenya Leonov Hi. Okay. Never know how far to stand away from it. Good? Okay. So I’m going to talk about my experience with the refugee camp in Tijuana and how that got started and how a small group of people could make a big difference. So very similar, I’d say. My slides won’t be as impressive. All right, so let’s give it a shot. So a little about me. I’m Zhenya. It’s the English translation. It would be Eugene. Okay. Closer. So I moved to the USA when I was nine. I’m from San Francisco. I studied computer science at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Currently I’m what they call a freelance programmer. Previously I managed the big data team. Little bit of background. So I have an interest in behavioral economics and I think I’ll talk a little bit about how that changed my view of everything that went on at the refugee camp. And sometimes I moonlight and pretend I know how to do other things. All right. Let’s talk about how things happened. So Russia invades Ukraine on the 24th of February. Pretty soon after Ukrainians started arriving at the San Ysidro border. So for those of you who don’t know California, that’s the border between San Diego and Tijuana. And so right away we start seeing news reports, this is Vice. Homeland Security today. This is, I believe, Rutgers. And we see this all on our phones, right. We immediately, conversation started going right away from all the people in the Bay Area, people in Los Angeles. So this is what starts happening right away. This is the underpass where you cross by foot and by car from Tijuana to San Diego. So this is probably around March 1st, March 2nd, something like that. Both Ukrainians and other former Soviet Union people running away. So soon after, neither Mexico, Baja, California, that’s the local state nor the U.S. really wanted this to be happening on the border. So they allowed us to set up a refugee camp. So what happened? So they gave us a corner in the airport. Now, for those of you who have never been Tijuana, the airport is pretty small. So you could actually set up a corner right by the exit and then anybody who was flying in would see it. So we had a big sign that said Ukrainians, come here, we have information. We had hot food and everything for that. For most people, it was a 36 hour flight or a 36 hour trip. They had to get out of Ukraine, some with the help of Rubikus, they had to do three layovers to end up in Tijuana. So this is the airport. This is already an organized operation. So we provided hot food. We organized people. Mexico gives us a gym where we could organize a refugee camp. Side story, when I first wound up there, I didn’t know it was a gym and I saw a bunch of workout equipment, and I thought I’m not sure this is the best use of resources to get workout equipment for incoming refugees. So this is going to be kind of like a photo album as I go through it. So some of our volunteers, we’re open 24/7. All grassroots. Arriving refugees. This is more or less a registration area. Legal help. Our attempt to pass out some flyers of what to do next. The main gymnasium. We had people sleeping in the gymnasium and people outside in tents. A lot of children, mostly mothers and children. A lot of pets. Medical tent. Staffed by doctors and nurses, nurse practitioners. This is on the California side when people cross the border with children with need to have car seats for everybody wherever they were going to go. In Mexico, not so much. You can put a child on your lap and nobody is the wiser. So what did we quote unquote, accomplish? Well, the refugee camp was built in two weeks. So from start to finish, we had an organized camp with a medical tent with legal help in two weeks. Kitchen. We had hot food for everybody. So arriving refugees could get food. Children could get care. There were quite a number of people who needed medical help. Quite a number of people who needed legal help. We had a controlled process to get people from the airport to the refugee camp to the customs and border and help them cross the border to the U.S.. So who is we? A big contribution was made by a church coalition. So lots of churches in California, from Sacramento, from Fresno, from San Diego. So the coalition united with Ukraine. Not to be confused with the program name Uniting with Ukraine. The program provided by the U.S. government was not active back then, so there was no official program for Ukrainian refugees to come to the U.S. at that point. CCFR, Coordination Council for Refugees. This was just a grassroots organization that popped up on Telegram. Coordinating at first. Friends of mine went to the border when people were out in tents and they just said we should create an entity that was a grassroots organization. Nova Ukraine, was mentioned before they helped us with funding and other stuff. Al Otro Lado is organization that provides legal help on the Mexican side of the border to a lot of migrants. Doctors from San Diego set up a medical tent and volunteered their time. Others, there was lawyers that went there from Los Angeles, from San Diego. A lot of people came to help. Everybody on their own. Nothing was organized. We also had the same experience as Rubikus in the beginning. We said, okay, well let’s help these people out until somebody from those what they’re doing takes over. Nobody took over. Eventually we became the people who took over, the proverbial we. So Uniting for Ukraine starts in late April. And the camp closes pretty much later, April, early May. So we ran the refugee camp for a month. Okay. So this is where kind of my previous experience running teams and my interest in behavioral economics comes in, kind of the way I view things. So this is my experience, right? People may have a different view of things. So this is my personal opinion. So it seemed to be in the beginning that the grassroots organizations are a lot like startups with the same, you know, ups and downs. So initially everybody is excited. We’re helping people. It’s very addictive, we’re making a difference. And then eventually cracks start to form. People have different ideas about how to help, how to coordinate, who is in charge, etc. Coordination is very hard as it is in the corporate world, as it is in the startup, as it was there between the different groups that were starting to help. Case in point, we had a bunch of volunteers who arrived who didn’t get in because the group of people at the door weren’t aware who they were. And nobody gave a list and nobody knew who was coming. And we were trying to maintain some kind of security. It occurred to me that there was a lot of us who had corporate experience running teams working in large companies, you know, directors, managers, etc.. And how you can be very good at that, but there’s walls when you’re in the company. When you’re given a free for all, suddenly those skills aren’t just transferable. So case in point, we had a group of translators who were doing an excellent job translating U.S., you know, English documents, legal documents into Ukrainian into Russian or vice versa. And one of the things we had them do is translate all our ORR Office of Refugee Resettlement documents, because they were responsible for transferring minors across the border. We couldn’t transfer minors across the border that were there with without parents. And they would be taken into custody. And then we’d have to get them out. And by we I mean legal help, the lawyers that were working with us. And to do that, we decided, okay, let’s translate all of these documents from ORR. And nobody kind of had time to realize how many documents we need, what do we need, etc.. So we had people all over the world. Translators in Ukraine, in New York, all took 24 hours a day trying to translate this library of documents. We probably needed a few documents. There would probably be safeguards if you tried to do that in a corporate environment. Just get a bunch of highly paid, highly skilled people and say, translate this dictionary. So, another serious point. So we had the Undersecretary of Immigration from Baja, California, coordinating with us. All the volunteers, all the volunteer groups. We had the U.S. State Department coordinating with us. We controlled the line with Customs and Border Protection, meaning they told us, you know, we can process 200 a day, 500 a day, 1000 a day. And if we had more than that, people would be on the waiting list and we would prioritize, you know, single moms, sick, elderly. And at some point, it occurred to me, like, why are people listening to us. Who are we? Like, we’re not assertive. I’ve never taken a training course in, you know, how to triage people, right? It was a real surreal experience. But just like Rubikus, we became the experts, because nobody else was doing anything. Are we child trafficking? We had the number of minors that came with older siblings or came by themselves that had relatives in the U.S., etc.. And we were helping them get across the border. And we were strategizing about how to get them across the border and not have ORR take them into custody, which they’re mandated to do by U.S. law. And Al Otro Lado who have lawyers, one of their lawyers actually said, you guys realize what a unique situation this is, because if this was any other situation, you’re actually right now violating both Mexican and U.S. trafficking laws because you’re strategizing about how to get unaccompanied minors across the border. And that was a moment of pause. Sometimes simple is best. So all these websites are flying around from Nova Ukraine, from others with information about what to do when you get into the U.S., who to contact, etc.. And everybody has different pieces of information. I took and I created a Google document and I just put everything there. It didn’t look nice. It looked pretty ugly. There was a few bookmarks, but all the information was there and that that turned out to be really useful. And it just reminded me again how when you’re working in the free for all that sometimes you’re thinking, okay, we need to create a huge website because this is what you would do if you were working in the corporate world. You would hire a designer, you would create a website. I was surprised at how much it was a matter of who you know. So part of the situation was like a movie. The CBP, Customs and Border Protection, eventually they had their numbers. All the lawyers working at the border, they have everybody’s emails, they coordinate. When Ukrainians would end up at the border without with, you know, who did we miss, who didn’t fly into the airport, or somehow got there, they would call us and they would be like, go pick them up, you know, give them a number, process them, etc.. And it just occurred to me how much of this is done, you know, by a handshake. Not under the table, per se. Nothing illegal. But the entire system at the border runs on some amount of who you know, you know, goodwill, etc.. The Mexican side of the border. So sometimes it takes hours to cross the border if you don’t have the fastpass, if you don’t have your car registered. So we had the Mexican side of the border their analog of customs and border, get into our cars when we needed to cross, drive us on the Mexican emergency lane to the U.S. side. Get out, shake hands and let us skip the lines for 3 hours. Mexico is still Mexico, so there was some security issues. There is a lot of people trying to game the system and make money on the situation. A lot of people promising to get you over the border for some amount of money, telling you they’ll help you buy a car, telling you how to get across the border. This is mostly for non Ukrainians now that the program is active. You can’t go to Mexico without tips and bribes and do something like this, even if it’s very small. I got stuck in the lane to the U.S. by accident during peak traffic, and it was going to take me 4 hours to come across and go back. I drove in reverse on the side til I got to the exit I missed. There was a police officer there who said tip or ticket and I said, tip. And this is the photo of the U.S. Border Patrol opened crossing point just for Ukrainians in coordination with all the volunteers. And this is Ukrainians getting across the border. Initially, we had about three days for people to get processed after they fly in, so they’d have to spend three days at the refugee camp. By the end, it was less than 8 hours. So that said, that’s my experience with this. The only other thing I will say is that I was speaking to a friend of mine who was helping in western Ukraine and I was like, what’s your experience? Without telling her my experience. And the first thing she said was, my experience is that churches and other small groups are key in the acute phases of the crisis. We haven’t even had U.N. agencies, other agencies. They’re just starting to come here. They’re looking for housing for themselves. They’re trying to understand the situation. It’s already a month during the war. But grassroots organizations are the only ones right now making any difference. And we had the exact same experience. So questions will come later, I guess. All right. That’s me.

Olga Yulikova So. The people eventually arrive into safety. Correct. And they get a lot of help from other organizations, from government. They have shelter. They have food. They have medicine. Most of them. They’re all set in some way. My daughters and I decide to go and help those who are already in safety. We decide to travel to Germany this last summer, in the month of July to help individual families. That was our mission. We volunteered our time to help individual families, to help them adjust to their new life. Because it’s one thing you run away, then you settle somewhere. Then what? Our mighty team consists of one mother and two teens. One of them is here. Another one is watching us through Zoom. Hi, Natalia. Our budget was huge ($0). We had no sponsors. Our technology was phenomenal. We had a T-Mobile that barely worked in Germany for some reason. Our iPhones. We used WhatsApp, Facebook and Telegram to do everything we’re doing. And we started to meet our clients or our families. Who, as I said at that point, had a shelter, they had medical insurance. Their children were going to school. They had food on the table. The very first family we helped was the family of Taras. Taras is also with us today on Zoom. He and his family continue to live in Hamburg. And Sasha will share with you our experience with helping Taras.

Sasha Segal So Taras was the first family that we worked with. He escaped from Ukraine with his mother, who’s in the picture, his wife, who’s also in the picture, who is also disabled, and their very young daughter. And so they miraculously were able to come from Ukraine, they ended up in Hamburg, Germany. And so we connected with them online on Facebook. And the first thing we did with them is we went to doctors appointments. So as you can probably tell from the picture Taras is in a wheelchair, he is disabled, he is completely paralyzed on his left side. And so there are a lot of medical complications with that that needed to be addressed immediately. And so we went to doctors appointments and our role there was translating. So Germany had set up a great program and so they already had housing, their young daughter was going to daycare, you know, they were getting food. But their one problem was translation. There was no one to help translate and they don’t know any English. So as you can probably imagine, it’s a big problem. And so that’s where we came in. So we went to doctors appointments and translated for them, which got most of the medical things figured out. We set up doctor’s appointments in the future, so all the appointments that they’re attending now, we were there to help them set up. We got them groceries, of course, set up transportation. Also spent a lot of time on legal documents. Again, everything was in German. There was no translations, German or English. There’s no translation into Ukrainian, no translation into Russian. So my mom would do the translating with the documents as me and my sister, you know, were there in the house, either talking to them, playing with their daughter, spending time with them, did a lot a lot of worksheets and legal documents to get an electric wheelchair for Taras. And just a couple of days ago or last week, I think, we got the text from him that he did in fact get the electric wheelchair. So that was a big win. Yeah, that’s basically what we did for them. The next family you can take.

Olga Yulikova Sure. So as you can see, one thing leads to another. And of course, our next family was also quite disabled. A young woman, Inna, who is blind and has mobility issues she uses, she can walk a little bit, but she uses a special wheelchair, of course and a walker. And the only care giver and other person on her life is her 81 year old mother. It’s fantastic to have an apartment perfectly adjusted to their needs. They have a bank account that they don’t know how to use. They have all kinds of letters in the mail coming in, and they have no idea what is going on. Literally, they’re completely isolated. Nobody speaks Russian or Ukrainian around them. So we came in. And got a little scared when the number of letters we had to translate. Luckily, I had a childhood friend who lives in Germany and she quickly jumped on the telegram through interface with a phone. We figure it out what exactly German government was willing to do or not willing to do, and what was expected from Inna and her mother who were inside the apartment. We kind of snuck into their fridge to under the pretense that I wanted water and realized they had no food. So the kids ran to the nearest grocery store and we bought the entire store which we wheeled in on the grocery cart from the grocery store to their door. It was pretty entertaining. After we translated the documents, we realized that what was really needed is some kind of case management system, and definitely volunteer interpreters were needed, which we managed to get. My only skill is I work for state government here in Massachusetts. So one thing I know is how to work with bureaucracy. So that was the only useful case in that sense of organizing the case management system, because in Germany and the United States it’s fairly similar set up. Somewhere, someone knows what they’re doing. You just have to find that person. So we found that person. We’ve got several volunteers set up. I was extremely nervous leaving this family, this particular family in Hamburg, by themselves because of their extreme limitations, obviously. But they’re all set. They got their case managers. Everything is translated. They learned how to use a bank so they have access to money. And fingers crossed, we’ll see them at some point soon. And then we’ll move to Berlin and meet our third family.

Sasha Segal So towards the end of the trip we moved to Berlin, as my mom mentioned, and met with our last refugee. His name is Dimas. He left Ukraine when he was only 17 years old. That is exactly the age that I am and I can absolutely not imagine doing that myself. He left his mom. He left his grandparents. He left his friends. And he escaped all by himself and ended up settled in Berlin. He had an apartment that was given to him by the government, but basically everything else, clothes, computer, etc. he did not have. So we brought a suitcase of a computer, an extra phone, clothes, jackets, shoes, socks, everything that you can imagine, everything that you need on the day to day basis. We brought that from the U.S.. And so, when we went to Berlin, our intention was to simply meet him somewhere outside, drop off the suitcase, and that was pretty much it. That was our plan. But as you can see here, we took him to lunch. We sat down. He told us his story of how he escaped by himself. He told us everything he’d been through, you know, sleeping, standing up on a super crowded train because there was no room, etc.. And as you can see, the third bullet point, we immediately fell in love with him, almost adopted him, took him home to the US. Ultimately, we decided not to because the German system is running much better than the US system. So his future looked a lot, a lot better there. But we continue to support him daily. We call him all the time, message him through WhatsApp and me and my sister, who is in Montreal, Canada, she and I are going to be going back to Berlin this winter in December to visit him and make sure that he’s doing well. Get him some new winter boots and jackets and make sure he’s all set up for the rest of the year.

Olga Yulikova And as you can see, I’m going to try to stay sane. Thank you.

Salimah Samji Those of you on Zoom. We’re going to move to Q&A. If you have any questions, if you can post them in the chat. We have someone here in the room who will be able to voice your question for us. We’ll start with questions in the room, if there are any. But first, I think let’s give our panelists a round of applause. This is just phenomenal. I mean, I am just I don’t know about you, but I am so inspired. You know, people sitting in their homes, we spend so much time complaining about the weather, about all sorts of things that are just so not important. And here are people with busy lives just have done unbelievable things. And, Rita, your numbers, 20,000. That’s, you know, when these large organizations whose job it is to do this work can’t step up and do it, and it takes individuals just mobilizing. I love your first spreadsheet. You created a Google spreadsheet and just ask people who wants to go, who wants to volunteer. Simple free resources that have just such a huge, huge impact and made you an organization. It just is incredible. And Zhenya, also, listening to your story of just like, again, waiting for someone to pick up and be the next the transfer. And you were basically it for a year. You know, you just open up a refugee camp and then run it for a year without even thinking. That’s what you’re going to do. One month, sorry. Yes, one year would have been really hard. One month. But that’s a long time to be able to do that. And you know, Olga and your daughter, Sasha and Natalia, who’s on Zoom, it’s just phenomenal that you can up and go and give of your time of yourself to such an amazing cause, you know, for humanity. So thank you for sharing. So I want to open it up for questions that we have. Super.

Attendee 1 Hi. Thanks everyone for your presentation. My name is Leonardo, I’m Brazilian originally and of course pursuing here a mid-career master’s in public administration. Yeah, everything you mention. So thank you. And I used to work with the U.N. before coming to Harvard. And I also appreciate that in January, I will be joining a course organized by the HKS and the School of Public Health, which will happen in the Ukrainian border with Poland. And we will be interviewing and discussing mainly the situation of Ukrainian refugees and how to handle the civilians that had to flee the war. So we’ll be discussing that with government representatives, U.N. agencies, everyone involved in that. As a preparation for my trip and for this course, I would like to ask you to like what would you like to discuss or what would you ask these key people, like these key organizations, about the situation of refugees like. So I can also ask these questions on your behalf. Thank you.

Salimah Samji Wonderful. We’ll take some more questions. Did you have one as well? Yep. Thank you.

Attendee 2 Hi, thank you for sharing. My name is Khalil and I’m from Saint Lucia and the work that you do is really inspiring. I have a couple of questions. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the partnerships that you sort of developed as you created the programs, especially with the private sector. How did you engage them? Did they come to you or did you have to go to them? And then how did you formalize it? And then the other question is, you know, if there is some sort of situation, a scenario where you need to set up programs to accommodate refugees, what are the first or the biggest, most important 3 to 5 things that you think needs to be done immediately. Thank you.

Salimah Samji Okay. Do we have any questions from our. We have one question from Zoom. Najwa?

Attendee 3 Does Rubikus do any background check on their operators, coordinators, local volunteers? And are there any situations when volunteers fail?

Salimah Samji Okay. We’ll start with Rita. The last question first.

Rita Vinokur Well, about the background check. Well, talking about the first volunteers, they were people we would know personally and mostly it was a bunch of friends and coworkers and, you know, lots of immigrants tried to stick together. I guess we all know how it goes when you move to another country and you don’t know much people here and there. You just try to stick to your own kind who can speak your own language. So basically, every single volunteer who comes to us would most probably personally know some of us already. It could be someone’s good friend, family member or coworker. And that’s like the first part. This person would be usually brought by someone. And it really helps to build the trust. And that’s like the very first step. And then every person goes through the interview with one of our most professional volunteers, one of the oldest ones, we would call her our teacher. Her name is Margarita, and she lives here in Boston, by the way. So she would do the first interview and she would try to figure out the person’s motivation. We cannot do like a background check, like an actual one. We are not like an organization who can do it legally. So the idea is to figure out what person is looking for and what’s their motivation to help. And then people would come to me and I would do like a little introduction course, which is like one two hour webinar where we talk and discuss the Rubikus and discuss what do they want to do. And mostly after that, we can figure out what kind of person is in front of us and what kind of job we would trust this person with. The person would never get to like any database without proper training. So we would rather afraid they’re going to like ruin the database not because their evil, but because not like skilled enough. Or they would put like the documents to like wrong folder, not because they want them to get away, but because they just mixed it up. And that’s what we do. We trust people. We teach them how to work. That’s basically the whole thing. We would never run them through some like serious background check because it’s like we have nothing to hide, don’t have much private information which would be afraid to like share with someone. The only thing is finance and we have people from Germany because we’re officially registered in Germany and we would have our content who is, hi, [01:05:58]Badeen, [0.0s] if you are listening to me right now, who’s in charge of like all the finances. So he’s the only person who delivers the money to those who spend them. But mostly people are trusting us. They would spend their own money on tickets for refugees and then they’ll get refunded. So I would ask them if they’re planning to do any background check on us before spending money on refugees and then waiting if we return them or not. So that’s basically it. I hope I answered your question. I don’t know who you were, but yeah, I hope so. As far as the other questions, well, I’ll let my colleagues respond. I’ll think about a little bit about them. Okay?

Zhenya Leonov Okay. Well, let me remember the questions. One of the questions was how did we build relationships with the private sector and things like that? So that happened really organically because we are fortunate enough in the greater we do have connections in a lot of places. What does that mean? So I’m a programmer I guess by trade. A lot of my friends in the Bay Area and a lot of people helping out either work in Google or Facebook or Salesforce or whatnot, and eventually the chats on Facebook, the chats on Instagram, mostly they got very organized and it would be something like, you know, we need housing for this family, you know, who has some connections, where do we go, etc.? Does anybody work at the Airbnb? Can we get a voucher, which we did get a bunch of vouchers from Airbnb. Or it would be like, this kid needs a laptop, he’s going to school. I get an old laptop from work. I’m sure you have it in the closet, what’s required? And that just kind of grew organically. And, again, Nova Ukraine, I know a lot of people in Nova Ukraine, which is a big mid-size NGO, I guess the only one that I’m aware of or decent size that has been around since 2014. And they do a lot of coordinating and we know a lot of people there. They have contacts with a lot of big companies. So that kind of just grew organically. You had another question. Right. So. I think that’s really dependent on the specific place. I mean, what you need to set up in Europe is probably different than what you need to set up in Tijuana. But I mean, universally, it’s, I guess, pretty simple. So they need to stay somewhere. Right. So, um, housing. So one of the problems we had is that gymnasium, broken bathrooms, no showers. And there’s women with kids. They need to, you know, the baby hadn’t had a bath in like three days, etc.. So basic infrastructure like that, things we take for granted. So first things first, right? It’s like it’s an emergency and then you go from there. So I mean, I guess that would be my answer. And then, what would I ask of these organizations? You mean like the big organizations like U.N.? Are they asking where are they? But if I was a little bit more eloquent, I would say what is required for sort of so the military as a quick reaction force while they get everything else in gear. What’s required for a quick reaction force from these U.N. organizations, from all the other organizations that are supposed to do this? The feeling I got that it takes them years to ramp up. You know, the crisis is over by the time they’re ready to take over. So that’d be that’d be my question to them. And I would like to say one more thing. I was just thinking about how many people were involved in the refugee camp. I mean, I played a really small part, so I don’t want to sound here, sit here and sound like I ran the camp. I played a pretty small part. I was driving at night, which is something I like to do and they needed drivers at night, and that’s how it started. And then I was helping at the legal desk from time to time during the day, and I am doing a lot of work right now in the Bay Area with a lot of people who actually cross the border. And I was like, Oh, wait a minute. Were you in the camp? Yes, they were in the camp to get benefits, to get health care, things like that. I volunteer at the legal clinic. So there is actually a lot of things happening right now in the States now that the program is open. But I just want to be clear, I didn’t run the camp myself. I played a small part.

Olga Yulikova I just want to say Zhenya’s being extremely humble. That’s one thing I want to make sure you guys understand. That both these wonderful individuals, Rita and Zhenya, they do an enormous amount of work. Enormous. I don’t know if they sleep at all. Zhenya is chatting with people nonstop, answering legal questions, giving advice, sending documents, providing information, redirecting questions, finding the right contacts. Maybe he’s not the one who could really boast about things, but he is definitely the one who’s going to get it done. Okay.

Rita Vinokur Now, the main question was already said out loud. I mean, Leonardo, is the answer for Leonardo’s question, yes. Where they are? That’s the biggest question for the big guys, for their organization. Like, U.N., like why are they not here? But I really want to add something because for now, for example, we started establishing the partnership with IOM, which is International Immigration Office, and that’s what we’re actually doing, trying to ask the right questions to build a partnership. So I have an answer. What we’ve done and what worked well, what didn’t? Our first question was, what do we need to do to meet your standards that you’re willing to help us now? Because all those organizations that have really high standards, it’s like you cannot send the person’s like passport. We, they like email, for example. You can just put it to some special secure folder. Or for example, you cannot start arranging the process of buying tickets when the person didn’t cross the border yet. Or you cannot do this, you cannot do that. You cannot buy person like a flight ticket before there is a response from the other side that someone is meeting them there and accommodating them there and so on so on. We are really agile on that and I would say I’m proud of it. We can buy a ticket and then find a host and then find a volunteer. They cannot work like that. That’s not how it’s organized in the bigger companies. So if you really want to get them involved, unfortunately we are the ones who need to make some extra steps towards them in understanding needs. That’s what I would say. That’s my experience. Maybe it’s different with the other organizations, but that’s what I’ve learned. And for the other question, like what are the needs of the like basic needs of the refugees, what we need to establish, what we need to build, what kind of infrastructure? For us, it’s all dependent on numbers. We do like lots of research, like how many people are coming through each of the borders, especially when we opened the northern route. We call the northern route the way where people would leave Ukraine and go to Russia first and then all the way to Europe. Like all these, people from Mariupol, lots of people from Kherson and the other occupied territories, they would have to go through Russia. Some were like brought to Russia against their will. So it was like tons of people, thousands and thousands. And we were actually like doing numbers. It’s like, okay, 50 people daily are crossing the border in Narva, which is tiny Estonian city, which means we need to find accommodation for 50 people daily. We would rent everything in Narva, like literally every single place, then we’ve built our own hostels. Now we have two hostels in Narva we basically own. And then we realize that Narva is so small that we need to send people somewhere. So we started renting buses and we have three buses weekly. Guess we just did the math. We realized that to bring people somewhere out of Estonia, which is a dead end, if you don’t want to go to Finland, you need to leave Estonia, like to Latvia, to the south. So we started renting those buses. And it was kind of funny because I was the one sitting in Pennsylvanian village sending those buses, like announcing, okay, Mr. Ivanov, boarding the bus right now. And now the families, of five people with two cats boarding the bus now, and it’s like 45 people. And then I say, bye bye, good luck. And then I hang up. So that’s what I was doing, like in the morning, sitting at my home when I send my kid to school. And then we rented the whole hostel in Riga and it became a hub. So we realized that with that flow, we need people. We need space for every single person who arrives by the bus, which means 45 people just from the bus. And then we would have a Latvian border as well, which means even more people and so on, so on. And we had to be like really agile because that would change over months. Estonian flow has decreased, but Poland has opened. The other flow going through Belarus to Poland has opened up and it was like hundreds of people coming through Poland then. So you need to rearrange the whole infrastructure and find some partners in Poland and stand renting hostels in Poland and so on so on. So I would say it’s an agile response and you can never predict what’s going to come next. But hostels and buses should always be ready for like the bigger groups of people. Otherwise, just too expensive to accommodate them. Like one by one.

Olga Yulikova Just very quickly, I wanted to see what my daughter actually has to say, because this is the generation that’s going to do the work you’re going to establish, right? What do you think is going to be needed? What kind of questions? No? Come on. Okay. While she is thinking, you’ve got to have language and culture expertize, this is what we’ve learned. You can have the best set up like the families showed you with mother and daughter and the best apartment in the best part of Hamburg stuck home with no access to anything because they don’t have a single person who speaks their language. Did you think enough? No. No. All right. We have somebody else.

Attendee 4 Can you hear me? I have both an answer and a question. So I’m also, hi guys, I work with all of them in the U.S.. I was part of CCFR that Zhenya mentioned and then founded a different organization called Svitlo, and we are helping Ukrainians in the U.S. primarily right now with information. And that’s, well, couple of the answers I want to give you is when you ask what is needed, of course, you know, people need shelter, people need food. But at the same time, people also need information. And in the U.S., unfortunately, unlike a lot of countries in Europe, that information is not readily available because the German government, Polish government, very quickly created the websites that are free. You know, from current standards, it’s pretty user friendly, you know, like in a great layout, the way U.S. government is organized, both at the federal level, at the state level, completely decentralized. So there is not even one entity which theoretically would be able to provide it. So, especially, again, speaking of like large organizations’ speed of response with a new program like this. So it falls in that and especially to provide it actually in the language that people can understand so in Ukrainian and Russian or actually in the, you know, non-legalese language. So that’s what we are doing. On the other hand, answering your question on partnerships, so that’s actually we’ve done a lot of that. A little less so right now with private sector. Even though my personal background is. I went to business school at MIT, I have a lot I know like and a lot of people that way, but and we actually may create partnerships with like in a lot of private sector to help people get hired, you know. But what we’ve done so far and it has been like since March, like seven or eight months, we’ve created a lot of partnerships with public sector. And that means I’m basically on the task force in Washington state, in California, in New York, I’m somehow in a task force of immigration lawyers. And no, I’m not a lawyer. And half of the time do not understand what they talking about. But it turns out I still have a lot of valuable skills to add. And so I’m doing advocacy. I went to D.C., I met with like some most important people who do immigration reform in the U.S. I was able speaking with like how you do it, like I was the person who was able at the beginning when the Uniting for Ukraine program was announced and nobody knew, like how to get people, for example, who are stuck in Mexico to the U.S.. I said, okay, we need to go to the source and this source is USCIS. So we just need to since like easy enough, we need to find the person or like even the clerk at the USCIS who works on this program, like in my private sector experience, like that’s not hard. I know person who works Google, I ping them, they contact me you know put me in touch with somebody else who works at the Google and that USCIS doesn’t work like that. But if you know enough, you pull in your LinkedIn account. And I literally my first step was like so I went to MIT for business school. There’s a joint program of Harvard Kennedy School. I was like, okay, every friend of mine who went to Harvard Kennedy School, I’m going to ping them and then I’m going to ping like, you know. And within two or three weeks I got in touch and I have a cell phone number of a person who is in charge of Uniting for Ukraine program. So that is to say, just use your personal connections that like, you know, pretty much things are not that hard if you’re willing. And surprisingly for me, my background is in private sector. I did not have high expectations of the U.S. government and all in all, actually, especially state governments far exceeded what I expected of them. Yeah, especially I got to give a shout out to Washington State. Really great. So, yeah. So that’s the the answers that I have for you. So the answers that I have maybe to the panelists and maybe like whoever is here from Kennedy School, is that. Okay, so we now it seems like we have a structure where we have like large organizations on the one hand with slow response, a lot of bureaucracy, and God knows how they operate, I don’t know. And then we have like, you know, a very speedy response. I’m part of that as well. And they don’t exactly overlap. And is that how we see that going on or there is some kind of integration that can possibly, you know, what’s the model of the future.

Salimah Samji Questions from Zoom as well?

Attendee 5 There have been many challenges at the southern border over the past several years, and it seems that CBP is not really equipped to handle how to move people safely without harming them. What was your experience working with them in getting refugees across the border safely? That’s the first question. The next question is how did it feel scaling up Rubikus from peer to peer help to massive operations with dedicated buses, hostels and schedules? Was it scary? And how does one become a volunteer for Rubikus now?

Zhenya Leonov Okay. I guess the first question goes to me. I guess I should start by saying overall, I don’t know what my opinion of CBP was. It probably went up a little bit, which may sound strange. The people we’ve worked with were there to do a job and they worked with us and they tried to accommodate us and what was happening. One of the problems is, without getting political, it doesn’t matter if you think we should let a lot of immigrants into the U.S. or a little. We need the working system and right now we don’t. And that manifests itself in the following ways. A lot of times the CBP doesn’t really have guidance, so they have to make decisions on their own. And what ends up happening is they make one person makes one decision one day. One person makes another decision another day. And a lot of times those decisions end up hurting people. And you can’t have a situation where if you meet the right CBP officer, you know, one thing happens. If you meet the wrong one, another thing happens. For example, whether or not an immigrant gets put, a migrant gets put in detention is up to the CBP officer and the guidance is lacking. With Ukrainians before the program was active. So Ukrainians in the program get two years parole in the United States and perhaps that be extended. But before the program was active, the length of their parole was basically up to CBP and somebody got guidance for a year. So they were given parole in general for a year. And then we found out that some of them were given parole for less than a year for about 360 days. And there was various questions as to why that was happening. And one, the answer was cynical, but perhaps it was true. A lot of benefits a Ukrainian doesn’t or any parolee does not get if there are paroled for less than a year. That has since been remedied by the program and by the laws which were passed at the federal level, which said anybody who entered the United States from Ukraine under parole of any length of time is eligible for the following benefits. But before the program was active, a lot of benefits weren’t available for anybody who got parole less than a year. So we asked the State Department, because we had contacts from our work with a few people in the State Department, so we asked them who gave the guidance? And the people at the State Department were like, I don’t know. We don’t know, we didn’t give this guidance. And then we asked the CBP, you know, who gave this guidance? And I don’t know. Somebody wrote some memo. So what’s happening is basically you have people who are using their judgment, so to say, but they don’t have guidance. One day it’s one thing, one day it’s another thing. And it’s really chaotic. So that’s not a working system, regardless whether you’re on the left or the right or the center, right. And I think that ends up hurting a lot of people. And right now, we have to we the the point here is we are figuring out what to do with the Ukrainians that got paroled for less than two years because their parole is going to be, for some of them, ending around April the first ones that started coming in. But I, I would like to emphasize that the people we were in contact with, you know, as I said, I think my opinion of CBP went up. And I’m sure that a lot of bad things happened. It’s inevitable for the way that the system doesn’t work for a lot of bad things to happen. But my experience has been more positive than that. They were trying to accommodate us. They were working with us, the minors that got put in ORR custody, which is a separate set of shelters. It’s not a detention, but all minors, because of child trafficking laws, are put in ORR custody. We were able to get them out. There is a process and, you know, that process worked, we got them out. So to that end, the experience I’ve had was positive.

Rita Vinokur Wow. Well, the question was, how scary is that? Well, I have three types of nightmares. We are running out of money. We are running out of coordinators. We are running out of refugees. And depending on the situation, it would be one or another or another one. So, well, my favorite nightmare would be running out of coordinators, I guess, I’d like the easiest one because, well, I certainly have some people who are ready to pull an all nighter. And when I do have like seventy  requests per day, which is insane, I would just tell people, okay, we have 70. No one is going to bed til we contact every single family because that’s how we operate. I mean, that was told everyone in the very beginning that we are taking 100% of  our requests. We do not do any filtration. We do not choose. We take them all. So if there is 70, it means, well, we are not sleeping tonight. And it’s not like every night. I mean, we have a huge team. The team is great. We’re resourceful, lots of people. So, I mean, it’s okay that sometimes we need to put some extra effort. So it wasn’t scary when the number of requests went by really high. Last time it happened when they announced the military drafting in Russia. So those refugees who were going through Russia, they were so scared that somehow Russia going to close the border to prevent Russian men from running away and they’re going to get caught in Russia and just like trapped there. So the number of requests increased like that. So it was dramatic. I mean, and we didn’t sleep for a week, but we managed. So I would say that that’s the least like scary part. Run out of money was scary when you have like ten requests per day and then 20, then 30 and then 40, you go and you fundraise. And the best way to fundraise is to be loud. Is to tell everyone what you’re doing, like every single person. And at some point there is someone who knows someone who knows someone who has money, you know. So that’s how it works. I mean, sometimes I tell this story, I think it’s alright to tell it now how we got the funding from Nova Ukraine, because one day I was a breastfeeding mum and it was a community of breastfeeding moms like international community and it was some girl who was volunteering for Nova Ukraine as one of the case managers. They do have like lots of case managers who would take care of a couple of projects, like every single person would, you know, be responsible for some of the projects. So we happened to be in the same breastfeeding moms group. And when I told everyone in that group what I’m doing, because we have like lots of Ukrainian girls there and they were trying to find a way to educate their loved ones and their relatives. So I advertized that there is Rubikus, we can help. And it was this lady she just wrote to me like and I’m working with Nova Ukraine. I’m volunteering for Nova Ukraine and we are providing some funds to the nonprofits like yours. So maybe you need some money. And like, yes, we do need. Well, honestly, at that point, I said no. Because at that moment we have everything covered by free volunteer like services, and everything in Europe was free for the refugees. But in the months when the Northern Stream kicked and we started evacuating people through Russia, then we would start like needing lots of money because those Baltic countries like Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, they were not prepared and they didn’t have all the free stuff. I contacted her back like, you know what? Now I need some money. And she arranged a first grant from Nova Ukraine. And then I happened to meet the board and I introduced the company. But actually she was the one who provided us with our first money from Nova Ukraine. So you never know when and how it will happen. Just be loud, just spread the word and that’s how it works. So, yes, it’s not scary when you know that you can do it. And actually, that’s what we believe in. That’s why we kept attracting new refugees. And then when you have requests, you build the model suits best. I think it’s not like about scaling. It’s about being responsive and being agile and trying to find the way to handle the situation you’re facing today. Because tomorrow the situation could be difficult, different and you can’t really predict what’s going to happen tomorrow. Yeah, that’s what we realized.

Salimah Samji One of the questions was how to be a volunteer for Rubikus.

Rita Vinokur If you’re a Russian or Ukrainian speaking person, you can go to our website and we do have a Google form. We have a Google form for everything. So we have a Google form for a person who wants to be a volunteer in Rubikus. So you just fill the form and then Marguerita will get in touch with you, ask you some questions, and then you’ll meet me over Zoom and I’ll tell you all about Rubikus and here we go. If you do not, well, Russian and Ukrainian are the only two languages which we use to communicate. Otherwise it’s going to get like, it’s going to be way slower. So unfortunately, if you do not speak Russian or Ukrainian, the only option for you to volunteer for Rubikus is to organize something, to spread the word, to fundraise. For example, those wonderful Christmas cards I already mentioned you, can do like little event in your church, school, in your university to send some cards to the refugees, to send some cards to the people you know, and want them to learn about us, to sell some postcards, like whatever you want. We have plenty of ideas how to raise money for Rubikus, so feel free to contact me on Telegram. I hope you’ll send around some information how to contact us. Yes, so that’s it, I guess.

Olga Yulikova I guess in conclusion, I would like to say that there is a job for everyone. If you’re interested in helping, we’ll figure out where to plug you in. Trust me. So that’s number one. Number two, to get back to Lisa’s question about now what? So we’ve got the big guys, the little guys, the government, the continual war. People are still struggling. They’re still running away. In fact, there’s someone here in the room who is a refugee from Ukraine who survived, came here to really save her daughter, 12 year old daughter, while her 31 year old son is in Zaporizhia, the city that’s always in the news where the bombs are falling every day, he’s there to protect the country. So her journey is not over. Her struggle is, if not just beginning, but it’s like at the height of it, that’s for sure. So there are people who constantly need help. How to link the big guys, the small guys, the corporate world, the government world through personal energy. Put your energy in it. If you don’t know how to do it, called the experts. The experts are right here. The experts are probably in your breast feeding group or other midnight drivers. And once again, I want to just give a shout out to the younger folks, the generation of my children. Engage your children, people. They are the future. They know how to use technology. They know how to mobilize everyone at the push of a button on there. Which app do you recommend?

Sasha Segal Instagram.

Olga Yulikova Tada. All right, use your kids. They’ll get it done.

Salimah Samji Super. On that note, we have gone way past the time we thought we’d end by 5:15, 5:30. And we are we’ve gone past that. But this has been really excellent. Thank you for your great questions and for coming here. And thank you to the panelists. I think this has just been awe inspiring. Anyone who thinks that they are just sitting at home and there’s nothing that they can do, I think you’ve proved them wrong, that there is something that everyone can do. It’s just about whether they really want to try. And if there is a will, there’s definitely a way. So thank you for what you do and what you continue to do. And thank you all for joining us for this talk. Thank you.