A round up of our activities in 2022, and of course warm wishes for the festive season.

This is the time of year where we normally pause for breath, pop a mince pie in the oven and reflect on the year.  An opportunity to provide all our volunteers and supporters a brief round up of what has happened in the past 12 months. The picture above shows St Sophia's Cathedral in Kyiv 12 months ago and we take the story up from there.

This year this task feels a little like being asked to summarise War and Peace on a side of A4!  Maybe a bad analogy, as unfortunately our lives have been dominated by war and we are a long way it would appear from any sort of peace.

The year began with the Omicron variant (remember that one, that seems a long time ago) having just ruined many people’s 2nd Christmas, and Brexit and the associated customs paperwork ruining our ability to get back on the road regularly, mainly to support the humanitarian issues in Greece and Northern France.

It became increasingly clear though by the start of February, that this was not going to be the focus of our attention for the year, and we started to plan for the Ukraine war, which despite a few weeks of talking and planning still caught us a little off guard the day it finally happened.

For all of those who where heavily involved in the admin, communications, aid procurement, warehousing, logistics, volunteer management, driving, fundraising and other tasks in those first days, weeks and probably two to three months, I am sure all will say they don’t know where the time went.  Aid was fast flowing, so much so that I am sure we missed some great opportunities but as a relatively small team we did all we could do, and all we could do turned into a huge amount. 

There are so many people to thank but to all of you who were involved at the outset, or to anyone who has stepped up in any shape or form, in a small or a large way, we thank you, and more importantly the messages we get from our partners on the ground, the people that you have helped thank you.

There have been some really great things happen this year and people have pulled out the stops to raise money.  We have had a London Marathon runner, some skydivers, a Poem-a-thon, more than one gig and festival and sponsored walks and hikes, to name but a few things.  The donations continue to be received, but the Ukraine fundraiser that we put live at the start of the year that has raised in the region of £150,000, we are just in the process of calculating the exact numbers when gift aid and offline donations are included in the total.

The country we were helping was different, but the basic essence of what we needed to do was the same as what we have done for many years.  Find good partners, get accurate needs lists, procure that aid, ideally nothing more and nothing less, and then get it into the hands of those who need it. 

We very quickly, through visiting the region, and via local knowledge, found some partners that we felt comfortable working with and the aid started to flow.  The first truck left on the 9th of March.  In the 9 months that have followed we have delivered ourselves or organised 38 trucks of aid, in 39 weeks, pretty much one a week. Quite a remarkable effort when you put it on paper like that!

Due to the situation on the ground, we have needed to change how we operate as a charity, for the immediate term at least.  The previous model, pre covid, was using a mixture of drivers, flyers and a partner on the ground. The war means that the areas we need to get to are not safe to visit personally at the moment, so we have therefore needed to make alternative arrangements to get aid into the country via our new partners. Integra and Ukraine on Palms (UOP) have been the key to this.  

For Integra, we have driven our aid to warehouses in Romania or Slovakia and they then transport it onto Kyiv or other base cities where it is unloaded into temporary warehouses before heading onto the final destination in smaller trucks.  Smaller trucks are mainly used in Ukraine at the moment as they are safer and less likely to be targets.

For UOP we have been using backloads, empty commercial trucks that are returning to Ukraine, that we fill with our aid, and we are charged for fuel and time accordingly. UOP are based in Kyiv and have a well-located warehouse where they sort what has been delivered, working out what is needed in what city and then distribute all over the country both to areas such as Kherson and Kharkiv. They also work with more local projects in cities closer to Kyiv such as Irpin and Bucha that were badly damaged during the Battle of Kyiv in March of this year.  UOP face their own challenges with aid distribution right now, as earlier in the year their truck was targeted and destroyed whilst doing a distribution to the front line for another charity.  Luckily the drivers had just completed the distribution and were taking some refreshments, so the truck was empty. Such are the challenges of aid distribution.

We had a joint convoy with TEECH into Moldova in August, a country that TEECH have a huge amount of experience in. Moldova not only has its own economic problems but now has in excess of 90,000 refugees who have chosen to stay in the county after the initial influx of roughly 500,000.  This, according to the World Food Programme’s report in September, puts Moldova as the country who is hosting more Ukrainian refugees per capita than any other country.

Whilst Integra and UOP have been our two main partners for Ukraine we have assisted with logistics for a number of other deliveries including the hospital beds that were taken out at the very start of the conflict, several truck loads of duvets and pillows courtesy of Whitbread/Premier Inn and a number of water containers from Wessex Water. 

The full list of aid would be very extensive to list here, but suffice to say that in addition these more specialist items there has been a lot of immediate aid, food, blankets, hygiene and sanitary items, clothing, household cleaning products and toiletries.  As the winter has begun to set in and the electricity issues cripple most of the country, we have also started to ship gas stoves and generators, the latter being a big focus for the coming loads.  

One area that has seen a lot of growth this year has been blankets, with people lining up to knit either blankets or squares that are then crocheted into blankets for us.  This has been driven by some great PR about what we do, an article in Simply Knitting in September and a podcast on Haptic and Hue has brought many people to us.  All of these knitters have been coordinated by Sue Hoskinson who has done an amazing job pulling all this together for us, thank you!

Another area that has really started to work well this year has been our Drop off Points (DOP’s), thanks to Bernard Sullivan for pushing for this solution. Our drop off points are now performing a key function in the aid collection that feeds the warehouse and then of course the main loads.  It takes a lot of time and effort to be a DOP manager so of course we want to thank all of those that currently volunteer for this role.  We would also like to encourage others to come forward and help us with this as we head into 2023 with all the need that this will entail.

As we start 2023 we will do so with a new website. There will no doubt be some teething problems so please bear with us, but also let us know what you think.  We have tried to adopt the ‘Less is more’ approach keeping it factual with day to day updates hopefully moving more to social media, dependant upon volunteer resource to keep it updated. More of that to follow shortly.

The aim going into 2023, would be to ‘Black Box’ our operations to Integra and Ukraine on Palms. We will not be looking for any new partners. The necessary due diligence has been done and as they can deal with the paperwork for us, until we can get our own trucks into Ukraine, it is going to be a matter of keep procuring aid, filling backloads and getting them moving to Kyiv or loading our own trucks, mainly the 40 tonne artic, and getting this to Bratislava or Suceava.

Given the amount of aid we are moving we need help.  I know this is where many people are tempted to skip a paragraph or two, please don’t.  We are always in need of people to help us achieve our aims.  The conflict in Ukraine has brought some people to the charity, some new and others who have started volunteering again after a period of inactivity.  Some of these have lasted and some have only lasted for a very short time which is a shame.  We have also lost some people due to personal circumstances, also clearly a shame and we need new people to step up and fill those shoes.  

Whilst mentioning the people we have lost, this year we very sadly saw the passing of Graham Crame and Bill Nelson, two huge supporters of Hope and Aid Direct, both of whom leave a huge legacy not only just with Hope and Aid Direct, but in all of the great work they did to help others.  Bill did many convoys to Kosovo with his long time driving partner Norman.  A big focus for them were schools and they helped many institutions with school materials as well as delivering pianos to several upcoming musicians.  Graham was part of the ‘Grumpies’ partnership with Jon Cox and who outside of HaAD worked on other projects, notably the Kindertransport Memorial in Harwich.

They are huge boots to fill, but one of you out there I am sure has it in you to take the charity to new places, and provide as much hope and aid as these amazing people did.

The main skill we need is commitment.  If you have an hour or two a week spare or a few hours a day we can find the right thing for you.  If you have any specialist skills, which we all have if we are honest with ourselves, we can use these.  Please visit the website to see what specific opportunities are available.

Another reason for needing more people is the breadth of issues that we face right now.  Ukraine of course has been the focus, but if we had the volunteers there remains so many things to do, so many projects to support and aid to deliver. 

This year, with the resources we had, apart from Ukraine the main project we have worked on has been the supply of tents and sleeping bags to Northern France. Most of these items are gathered doing festival salvage with Herts for Refugees, who are the main organisers of this project.  We went to France three times this year in January, July and September and we intend to continue with this support going forward.      

With the help that is going to be needed for Ukraine, I fear we will be needed for many years to come, so growing that volunteer base so that we can have a variety of international arms will be key to our future.  In a time where refugees are threatened with deportation to Rwanda and where many genuine refugees are not provided with any safe routes to claim asylum, thereby pushing people into small boats, there is and will remain a lot to do. From experience I fear the situation in the channel will get worse as will migration around the world due to a number of circumstances, conflict, lack of resources and climate change. Government rhetoric and false platitudes will not resolve this situation, only action will.  Unfortunately at the moment, the key question of why people are migrating keeps being ignored.

Until proper process is put in place to prevent there being 100,000,000 refugees in the world, charities like ours will be needed, whether that be in The Balkans, Greece, France, Ukraine or dealing new crises wherever they may appear over the coming years.

As we finish our mince pie and cup of tea and wrap up the newsletter, let us not dwell on the myriad of challenges that we face, rather think about the problems that we day to day manage to overcome.  Think of the smiles you put on peoples faces, be that through a tube of toothpaste that they cannot afford, a knitted toy clown that is received by a little child, or a candle that in the darkness of Ukraine provides light, but more importantly provides some hope, hope that 2023 will see some change to their lives and the beginning of a new chapter, one of rebuilding.   I have no doubt that you will all continue to help as many people embark on this journey and we thank you all for doing that.

Merry Christmas to you all and best wishes for 2023. 

Catch up in the New Year!