Street.aid.daily from Odessa, Patrick Le Tréhondat
9 million Ukrainians out of a population of 32 million live in poverty. It is known that in June 2023, around 25% of Ukrainians did not have enough money to buy food. According to the UN, around 7.3 million Ukrainians face moderate or severe food shortages, including 1.2 million children and 2 million elderly people. 1 in 4 homeless people in Ukraine is internally displaced person Street.aid.daily (SAD) is a leftist outreach collective helping homeless people in Odessa. SAD is employing intersectional lens in talking about homelessness, taking in account class, gender and race of the people they’re reaching out to. This allows them to develop more ethical and non-hierarchical approach in helping homeless people. Their approach is “Solidarity, not charity.
Could you tell us about Street.aid.daily and its history?
We started as a political reading club in 2020. After a year of reading socialist and anarchist literature, we decided that’s not enough, we need to make change, and we created a mutual aid collective focusing on helping people living on the street.
What are your activities?
In 2022 we started our first outreach campaign “Saving Fingers - Protecting Health”, because we noticed how many homeless people during the winter get frostbite and amputation afterward, so we started providing homeless people with warm clothes and chemical hand warmers. We’ve been doing outreach service for two years every Sunday now: supplying homeless people with socks, underwear, hygiene, contraception, doing art practices with them and providing first aid. Additionally to our outreach, we continue to organize leftist reading club and movie screenings with discussions afterward.
What is the situation in Odessa in terms of poverty and social exclusion?
The situation with homelessness in Odessa was bad before the full-scale invasion and after 2022 became even worse. Our government completely fails to prevent the number of homeless people growing and then fails to help people already living on the street.
In the Commons video, we see a veteran living on the streets. Can you tell us who the people you are helping are?
We had veterans living on the street since 2014. Usually they’re people who developed PTSD during the war, which oftentimes causes alcohol and drug dependence as an only way to cope. Since 2022 we saw instances of both homeless people being mobilized to fight in the war and veterans returning from the frontline and becoming homeless. Recent statistic showed that 1 in 4 homeless people is an internally displaced person. Homeless people aren’t a monolith: we help women, people of color, disabled people, LGBT+ people.
In the video, we also see the squat-space that you manage. Can you tell us about it?
SRZ-2 is an abandoned shipyard factory. Our group is among the many artists, craftspeople, and activist who live and create there. It’s a space where we can cook and eat together, meet new people, develop new projects. We organize our leftist book club and lectures there. This summer, we had our first anti-authoriatatin basketball tournament on it’s territory.
What are the prospects for the people in the video?
To be honest, prospects are not great. The number of homeless people is constantly growing, we see it during the outreach every week. The only places they can go to are government or NGO-funded shelters. Sadly, social workers there don’t have enough resources to help people, so they remain stuck living on the street for years and years. In reality, people can’t depend on these institutions, they’re left to solve their housing problems mostly on their own. The longer the person lives on the street, the higher their chances to die there – these are the prospects.
How can Ukraine get out of this situation of poverty? What should the government do? And if it doesn’t want to, what should be done?
Create affordable housing. Control the housing market, so rent-prices stop skyrocketing. Implement Housing First policy to really help homeless people. If they don’t want to do what’s necessary to stop more people ending up on the street, people will take matters in their own hands.
Contact: mutual.aid.ods@gmail.com
Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/street.aid.daily/
A Video of Commons about Street.aid.daily
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARVOijDrwtQ&t=720s
subtitles: in English, French and Spanish.