Give support to 1,000 Ukrainian orphaned-children

Dear Friend,

Thanks to the generosity of individual donors and the support of GlobalGiving, this project continued to grow throughout the spring and summer of 2026. Between April and July, people from around the world chose to stand with orphaned children and children deprived of parental care in Ukraine, and their trust turned into real, measurable support on the ground.

With this support, we continued providing psychological, educational, and family-strengthening assistance to children who have lived through some of the hardest circumstances a child can face: the loss of parental care, displacement, and the ongoing realities of war. Your contributions helped us to continue keeping specialists close to these children, keep families in family-based care supported, and keep safe spaces open where children can be cared for, heard, and helped to heal.

Psychological support remained the heart of the project. During this reporting period, our psychologists and psychotherapists provided more than 1,343 individual psychological consultations to children and their caregivers. For children with developmental needs living in family-based care, corrective teachers and a special-education specialist delivered a further 507 consultations and sessions, giving these children consistent, specialized attention that is rarely available to them otherwise. Together, these sessions helped children better understand their emotions, cope with stress and loss, and slowly rebuild a sense of safety.

Keeping children in families, not institutions, is the core goal of this work. To make that possible, we provided 289 legal and psychological counseling sessions for adults creating or sustaining family-based care, including adoptive parents, foster carers, and parents running family-type homes (). We also held community events promoting family-based care and adoption, bringing parents and children together around the themes of parenthood and the path toward giving a child a family. 

Preparing older children and youth for adulthood was another key focus. We delivered 75 trainings during the reporting period – non-formal education trainings for adolescents and youth, building skills in communication, leadership, digital literacy, and self-awareness, and professional trainings for the child-protection specialists and social workers who work with these children every day. In addition, career-guidance consultations helped young people think concretely about their futures, and 88 children in frontline regions took part in educational catch-up programs designed to recover learning lost to displacement and disrupted schooling.

In the frontline and high-risk regions of Zaporizhzhia, Kryvyi Rih, and Mykolaiv, the donor support was felt especially directly. There, donor funds helped provide psychological consultations for children and their caregivers, educational catch-up for dozens of children, parent-support groups, and structured case management, including families who reached the milestone of receiving three or more coordinated services. This is your support at work in the places where it is needed most.

This period also strengthened the foundations of our work for the long term. Ridni established a Supervisory Board to ensure transparency and accountable governance.

Two moments this period stand out as symbols of what this project makes possible. In Lviv, we opened "Tvii" ("Yours"), a new children's space at the Ridni Center for Social Support of Children and Families – a safe, warm place created specifically for children who have lived through difficult life circumstances. There, children can receive qualified help from psychologists and social workers, take part in developmental activities and art therapy, and simply exist in a caring environment. The opening was attended by regional and city authorities, the Ministry of Social Policy, the National Social Service, and the OSCE Support Programme for Ukraine, a reflection of how many partners it takes to give children back a sense of care and full safety.

In Truskavets, we ran a five-day Summer School for foster families and family-type homes, welcoming five families this year. Parents and children took part together in trainings, interactive workshops, and shared activities – from sessions on building trust within the family and preventing caregiver burnout, to psychological trainings, creative workshops, sports, and a mountain hike for the children. Beyond the practical skills, the school gave these families something just as valuable: time together, and the company of other families walking a similar path. The Summer School was organized by the Lviv Regional Center for Social Services together with the Ridni Foundation, with the support of UNICEF.

These activities were made possible through the combined support of GlobalGiving donors and our partners, and delivered across seven regions of Ukraine: Lviv, Zakarpattia, Ivano-Frankivsk, Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhia, Mykolaiv, and Ternopil.

Despite the ongoing challenges of the war, the children in this project continue to show remarkable resilience, curiosity, and a desire to grow. For many of them, the support you provide is the difference between facing these years alone and facing them held – by a specialist, by a family, by a safe space that is truly theirs.

Your support through GlobalGiving truly matters. By standing with orphaned children and children deprived of parental care, you are helping build resilience, dignity, and the chance to grow up in a family. Thank you for being part of this impact.

With warmest regards, 

Ridni