The Power of Community: Growing Together with Remember Us.

Ever since the Remember Us community stepped in to support our shelter, the pace of change has noticeably picked up. People and organizations that are just trying to survive usually look very depressed. Every month for four years, we had no idea what would come next. We wrote grant applications with very little hope of success, held charity events abroad, and reached out to the authorities (with zero success). Despite everything, we kept working, we kept saving lives. But it is one thing to balance on the edge of survival, wondering if you can even pay the girls for their incredibly hard work, and a completely different thing to plan major structural changes.

A new, larger kitchen, our first isolation ward, renovated rooms, an extra workspace—we now get to decide for ourselves what is most important right now.

Here is a fresh example: an elderly woman from Kharkiv used to live with her daughter. Her daughter decided to end her own life, and the grandmother was brought to us. She was crying her eyes out, thinking she had been brought here to suffer and die—because that’s exactly how Soviet-style elderly care used to be. But our wonderful Christian came up to her, helped her onto a walker, and guided her down the hallway. He showed her the kitchen, the bathroom, took her out to the terrace, and showed her the fireplace, the dogs, and the chickens and ducks.

Do you see her smiling in the photo?