Feminist Workshop; Translation Patrick Le Tréhondat
This August marks exactly 2.5 years since our public organization, “Feminist Workshop”, opened its first shelter for internally displaced women. Let us remind you that at the beginning of the full-scale invasion, we opened three shelters. Two of them operated for six months each.
Today, we want to announce important news for us — our largest shelter, which has existed since June 2022, is closing.
In this publication, we would like to summarize our work, share more internal experiences that we may not have always highlighted, and answer the question of what we plan to do next.
Why is the shelter closing?
To be honest, closing the shelter is a great sadness, not only for the crisis team that opened this shelter but also for all the teams in our organization. Attentive visitors* to our events might have noticed that for two years, our organization’s office was a small room in the building of the large shelter. Thus, very often, lunch breaks in the office took place in the shared kitchen with the shelter’s residents, over conversations and coffee. Our community events were held in the attic, where, at other times, children who lived in the shelter played. Therefore, this is a very important place for our entire organization and very dear to us.
We believe that the shelter has fulfilled its initial function — a temporary place where people could “wait out” the situation.
Additionally, we fully maintained this shelter with funds from international donors, and now it has become impossible for the crisis team to secure funds for its continued operation at such necessary levels.
It is essential to emphasize that the issues of both funding and the feasibility of continuing to have come together in one picture: it has become more challenging for public organizations to find money for shelters, while municipal shelters have available spaces and opportunities to continue accommodating people.
What can we say about our work with the shelters?
Firstly, it was very timely! We opened this large shelter when temporary shelters, which were set up in kindergartens and schools in Lviv, were being closed.
We received a lot of criticism that six months had already passed since the full-scale war began, and public organizations were just starting to do something.
Furthermore, we indeed do not have the same resources as the state to carry out a full-scale evacuation and shelter people in one day. We do not have our premises or full-time employees. Furthermore, we needed time to find funding, plan, and finally, do work that we had never done before. But we managed to meet the needs of the situation very timely.
Specifically, in June 2022, many temporary shelters in schools and kindergartens were closing. This is where the story of our shelter begins. We shared the announcement with various groups of internally displaced persons. On the shelter’s opening day, June 1st, only one family, the Kyseliovs, came to us, whom you probably heard about in our posts. And they liked it, they chose a separate room. And, within half an hour, people started coming in: the shelter was fully occupied on the very first day!
We believe that the same can be said about the timeliness of the shelter’s closure. Currently, the situation in the Lviv region with the influx of people and the number of people planning to stay here is quite predictable, not chaotic. Many people have been living here for years, with little influx of new arrivals, and people still prefer to stay or evacuate to places not far from home, so they can at least travel there.
Therefore, temporary shelters like ours are not an acute need for the city at the moment. We have fulfilled our function, and now is the timely moment to leave the sphere of directly providing shelter services.
However, if you are looking for accommodation in Lviv and the region, please contact the IDP Support Center at: +380505554461.
According to the state classifier of social services, such a social service as providing shelter only requires certain conditions for organizing the space.
It, for example, specifies how a bed should look and how many square meters per person are required. The new Regulation 930 also clearly describes the rules of residence, and the behaviour expected of both the staff and residents. We are pointing out that there are general norms: no drinking, no smoking, no fighting, and so on.
In reality, social work requires much greater involvement in another person’s life. And this has its advantages and disadvantages.
The biggest question we’ve pondered throughout our work is to what extent our help should have boundaries, and whether these boundaries are even objective in the current situation.
Let me give an example that deeply impressed me when I heard it in a conversation with another colleague. She was telling about an elderly couple they had taken into their shelter. They arrived without documents, just a bag of belongings: everything they owned had burned down. Colleagues settled them in the shelter, gave them clothes, and food, and helped them restore their documents. Then came the issue of finding them employment. They helped the man from this family find a job at a construction site. On his first day at work, an accident occurred, and he died. And the same social workers, employees, and volunteers from the shelter helped raise money for the funeral ceremony and buried this person.
This case often makes me think about these boundaries: do they exist in the situation we live in now? Social assistance has now gone beyond any possible classifier of social services, even for such cases.
What did we do during the operation of the shelter that we could never have imagined?
We investigated the disappearance of “Black Pearl” cream in a room and helped a 60-year-old woman learn to say “no” and defend her boundaries. We helped find food and raised funds for rehabilitation after a kidney transplant. Furthermore, we renovated the house where our shelter residents were supposed to move. We organized singing events, discos, went on picnics. We tried to figure out: how many kilograms of food are needed for a picnic for 50 people?
We broke up fights. Not only that, but we came up with ways to help people reconcile, involving a psychologist. For example, we asked two conflicting parties to prepare borscht together. We created a magazine about the lives of our shelter’s residents. We helped people find jobs, listened to them…
We arranged supported housing for a person with an intellectual disability, helped fight an eating disorder, tried to revive a person after a suicide attempt, entertained children, taught a woman with a disability to write, organized film clubs, waited after interviews to offer support…
We didn’t highlight much of what we did. Perhaps, at times, we didn’t know how to do it appropriately, or maybe we were too caught up in our tasks and didn’t think about it.
We are incredibly proud of the crisis team that took on the responsibility of doing this work. I’m reminded of a quote from a cartoon where one character says to another: “Yes, I like those people the most who don’t pay attention to things like reality.”
Indeed, we often had to come up with solutions on the fly. There were times when no solution was in sight, and the whole team would head off for some therapeutic wine and pizza. We attended many supervisions, where we would just cry like mad and say, “No, we are never going back to that shelter!”
But there were also moments when we gathered, hugged each other, and said how amazing we were, how we had done truly incredible work. Working in a shelter means not living just your own separate human life or the life of just your family and friends. It means living each day the lives of the 20 people who lived in our shelter: sharing their problems, and their joys.
We rejoiced in their successes, mourned their failures, and got frustrated when new challenges arose…
In conclusion, I would like to say that, given the circumstances under which we met these people, this work was filled with a great deal of tenderness and care.
If I had the opportunity to say something to all the people who lived with us during this time, I would say that it was very important to me. During these difficult first two years of the full-scale invasion, when I was separated from my family, who are now in occupation and had no way to help my loved ones, it was incredibly valuable for me to have the opportunity to help you and to be needed. These were mutually beneficial relationships. We helped you endure as best we could, and you helped us. I believe that we all required each other to survive this war and to try to move forward with our lives.
The shelter is closing, but we continue to support women who are in crisis. We plan to continue our digital literacy courses and launch a new program, “Your Move Forward,” to support retraining. Our challenging but invaluable experience working in the shelter will undoubtedly lead to new social projects. We are working towards victory!
This text was prepared by Katya, the crisis coordinator. With much love!
Feminist Workshop, a feminist group based in Lviv.
Website
https://femwork.org/en/category/fm-news/
Facebook page
https://www.facebook.com/feministworkshop
On the refuge a Commons video - English subtitles available in the settings via the cogwheel.