BUILDING A PROSPEROUS UKRAINE TOGETHER: RAZOM FOR UKRAINE.

The organization Razom for Ukraine has been responding to humanitarian need and community-building in Ukraine since 2014. Dora Chomiak, chief executive officer of Razom for Ukraine, spoke to the Journal about the organization's journey from volunteer-run non-profit to recipient of tens of millions of dollars in donations, its partnering work with local institutions and its grant-making capabilities within Ukraine, and how their work across borders and languages and cultures is sustained by hope for the future of the country.

Journal of International Affairs (JIA): What was it like when Razom for Ukraine first got involved with the war effort?

Dora Chomiak (DC): It's funny when you ask what was it like when it began. We started when this phase of all of this started, and that means 2014. Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, and Russia has continued to invade Ukraine. Even recently, a couple of hours ago, there was a bunch of missiles. Razom came together as an all-volunteer organization, in Ukraine, outside of Ukraine, but really on Facebook, back before Facebook throttled distribution of information. Razom came together at the end of 2013, the beginning of 2014, to support people: pro-democracy, pro-human rights advocates in Ukraine. Since then, we have done a wide variety of things, and a lot of stuff has changed. But a lot of stuff has stayed the same. And what stayed the same was our focus on Ukraine, our focus on the future for a sovereign, successful Ukraine and our outward focus community-building collaboration approach to move very, very quickly to whatever the demands are at that moment. We're very agile. Because of that, if you were to look through all our annual reports, which you can do online, you'll see a wide variety of activities, ranging from medical support and veteran support to entrepreneur engagement and culture, films, very diverse activities, but all focused on Ukraine, all focused on community, all focused on figuring out how Ukraine can be a net contributor to the global community. How can that talent that's in Ukraine be recognized? How can we unlock that potential and put it into the world's community more effectively?

When February 24th happened, we had already, about a week and a half before that, opened up a fundraiser with a few other organizations to raise money in case things went south. We were thinking, "Well, maybe we should work with some of the people we worked with through COVID and for some of our veteran workers to train people in tactical medicine." That very quickly went from training people in tactical medicine to procuring tactical medical supplies and distributing them.

Just a quick history of our organization. From 2014 to 2022, we were an all-volunteer organization, fueled by very targeted fundraisers, mostly crowdfunded--and a few grants of a few thousand dollars. Over that time span from 2014 to 2022, we had developed relationships with almost 4,000 donors. 4,000 people would donate, and each year we received and spent about $200,000 a year. With that, I did a wide variety of projects. As of 2022, we now have over 170,000 donors and have raised over $75 million. We've spent most of it and also raised an additional $1 million in in-kind donations that we have also deployed--very rapid growth. We went from an all-volunteer organization to starting to transform to be a hybrid organization over 2022, where we started being able to...