Trauma Screening & Healing for Ukrainian Children

Dear Friends and Supporters,

Thank you for standing with War Survivors Institute and the children of Ukraine. We want to share an update on this project, and on what your generosity made possible.

We did not reach our full fundraising goal for this project. Over four months, 17 donors came together to raise $2,080. We know this falls short of what we'd hoped to raise, and we want to be transparent about that with you.

But we also want you to know this: every single dollar you gave was put to direct, measurable use. Nothing sat unused. Nothing was spent on overhead that didn't serve a child or a practitioner on the ground.

What Your Support Made Possible

This July, our team traveled to Ukraine to work directly with Ukraine Volya Foundation's "Level Up" camp - a two-week camp for children living under the direct conditions of this war: children returning from occupied territories, children who have lost parents to the war, children who have witnessed death firsthand, and children from front-line areas who have lost their homes and been forced to relocate.

We started by helping Volya Camp to choose the right screening tool - recommending the DASS-Y (Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale for Youth) to measure the children's psychological state in a way that was actually appropriate for this population. During the camp, our team led relaxation and art therapy sessions directly with the children - not lectures, not assessments alone, but hands-on sessions aimed at helping kids who have spent two years surrounded by war start to breathe, create, and think about something other than what they've survived.

Why This Matters

A child who has watched a home destroyed, or lost a parent, or fled under fire, doesn't stop carrying that just because the fighting moved elsewhere. Without someone trained to recognize it, that weight shows up as nightmares, as an inability to sit still in a classroom, as a child who no longer believes anything good is coming.

The relaxation and art therapy sessions we led weren't a one-time distraction - they were a way to give these children something they could keep. A breathing technique. A way to put feelings into a drawing instead of carrying them silently. A moment of actually feeling calm in their own body, so they know that feeling is possible, and know roughly how to find it again.

Because the camp ends. Two weeks is not forever, and these children go back to the same front-line towns, the same displacement, the same uncertainty they came from. But a child who leaves with even one real tool for calming themselves down is not starting from zero the next time it gets hard. Screening isn't the finish line, either - it's how we know which children need more than two weeks of camp, and it's how camps own team can keep identifying that need long after we've gone home.

The War Survivors Institute team continues this work. If this project resonated with you, you can support our next chapter here: https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/heal-young-hearts-support-children-in-ukraine/

With gratitude,

War Survivors Institute team

Links:

• Video from the Camp