Fellowship Programme
Country
Area of Interest
Topic
Updates coming soon!
| Country | Ukraine |
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| The budget development decisions | 0 |
Updates coming soon!
| Country | Ukraine |
| The scope of | |
| Type of solution | |
| The technology used | |
| The budget development decisions | 0 |
For Diana Daiub, co-founder and director of Support Ukraine Now, the Russian invasion of Ukraine wasn’t just a national crisis – it was deeply personal. As a long-time advocate for civil society, she knew that Ukraine’s civil society organisations (CSOs) would play a vital role in supporting those most affected by the war. But there was a challenge: how could these organisations, many already stretched thin, access the expertise they needed to tackle the growing demands?
Diana saw an opportunity in the global outpouring of support for Ukraine. Many people wanted to help, but logistics were difficult—how could international volunteers lend their skills to local organisations that were struggling with everything from project management to language training? This is when Diana’s idea was born: a platform that could connect international volunteers with Ukrainian civil society organisations, giving these organisations the support they needed while allowing people worldwide to contribute meaningfully to Ukraine’s future.
“I realised that the world was ready to help, but the challenge was creating a system that made it easy for volunteers and organisations to connect. That’s how the idea for Volunteer4Ukraine was born.”
Diana applied for the Eastern Partnership Civil Society Fellowship because she knew she needed support to turn her idea into reality. Through her fellowship, Diana developed Volunteer4Ukraine, an online platform that uses no-code tools to match CSOs with international volunteers. The platform allows CSOs to register and share their needs—whether it’s for help with fundraising, teaching English, or financial management. On the other side, volunteers from around the globe sign up and are matched with opportunities based on their skills.
“Before the fellowship, we had a form collecting contacts of potential volunteers, but we didn’t have the resources to match them with CSOs. The fellowship gave me the tools and connections to develop and launch the project, and we’re already seeing the impact.”
Over 2,600 visitors checked out the Volueert4Ukraine platform, with 24 CSOs and 39 volunteers officially registered within the first 3 months of the platform work. These volunteers come from countries like the US, UK, Germany, Switzerland, and South Africa, bringing a variety of skills from language teaching to strategic planning. The system identified 255 matches between CSOs and volunteers and made the first automated introductions, with five confirmed collaborations already underway.
One of the early successes includes volunteers from the UK and the US working with Smart Osvita, a Kyiv-based organisation, to teach English to children affected by the war. At the same time, Skhidnyi Menti, another CSO, has started working with volunteers from Germany and Switzerland to manage projects and finances. These collaborations show how international volunteers can fill critical gaps and help CSOs do more for their communities.
“The beauty of this project is that it’s not just about technical skills—it’s about building connections. These collaborations are not just helping CSOs meet their needs; they’re bringing people together across borders.”
Looking ahead, Diana is optimistic about the future of Volunteer4Ukraine. The platform is fully automated and can run with minimal supervision. As the war continues and the needs of Ukrainian CSOs grow, this digital tool will remain an important resource for hundreds of organisations. Diana plans to seek additional funding to keep the platform running long-term, ensuring that more CSOs can benefit from international expertise.
“Volunteer4Ukraine has shown that global cooperation can make a real difference. As long as Ukrainian CSOs need support, we’ll keep building these bridges.”
| Country | Ukraine |
| The scope of | |
| Type of solution | |
| The technology used | |
| The budget development decisions | 0 |
Updates coming soon!
| Country | Ukraine |
| The scope of | |
| Type of solution | |
| The technology used | |
| The budget development decisions | 0 |
Updates coming soon!
| Country | Ukraine |
| The scope of | |
| Type of solution | |
| The technology used | |
| The budget development decisions | 0 |
Updates coming soon!
| Country | Ukraine |
| The scope of | |
| Type of solution | |
| The technology used | |
| The budget development decisions | 0 |
Updates coming soon!
| Country | Ukraine |
| The scope of | |
| Type of solution | |
| The technology used | |
| The budget development decisions | 0 |
To save. To support. To promote. With these three ideas in mind Oleksii Marushchak, a junior researcher at the Schmalhausen Institute of Zoology of National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and a co-founder of the Ukrainian Nature Conservation Group, applied for the EaP Civil Society Fellowship in spring 2023.
“My main motivation is to help Ukrainian biologists that suffered from the war to save and publish as much data collected by them during their scientific career as possible… In most cases such information remains not published and may be lost forever due to physical destruction… If we teach scientists to work through the Global Biodiversity Information Facility this will be a great contribution to nature conservation in our country”, said Oleksii in his fellowship application.
Oleksii’s application, as well as his profile, stood out from almost 200 concept notes the EaP Civil Society Facility received within that call. Only 28 at that time, he already had been hands-on engaged in protection of nature and biodiversity of Ukraine for good 10 years, both as a scientist authoring more than 170 scientific works, and as an activist, working on the projects to develop Emerald Network and to promote open biodiversity data in Ukraine.
“Biologists become civil society activists when they want to see the results of their knowledge here and now”, explains Oleksii. His journey began at the end of 2014, when he, a bachelor student at the ESC “Institute of Biology” of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, joined his first project organised by the Nature Conservation Unit as a volunteer. Together with his fellow students, Oleksii traveled to the national parks to help the park managers with daily tasks – and to collect some first-hand data. He remembers that at the end of one of his trips he was approached by a park officer with a request to share his observations of the local amphibians. “I met some amazing professionals in those trips, and communicating with them was very interesting to me as a student; and then you see that your small report did help a national park in its works”, says Oleksii.
Within another volunteer project in 2016 Oleksii found his niche in science and activism – biodiversity data and GIS (Geoinformation System) modelling. “I was given a huge dataset in an excel sheet, some dozens of thousands of records of rare plants and position data,” remembers Oleksii. “I spent a month matching descriptions with finds locations in Donetsk oblast. A couple of years later an atlas of rare plants of Donetsk Oblast was published, with my name as its co-author.” Today he uses biodiversity data to develop scenarios for preserving and managing wildlife.
In 2018 Oleksii co-founded the Ukrainian Nature Conservation Group (UNCG) that now unites more than 50 nature conservation professionals and activists from all over Ukraine. The organisation is a leader in the field of protected areas and contributed to the establishment of 75% of the protected areas created in Ukraine over the past 10 years.
At UNCG Oleksii mostly works on biodiversity data managing and ecological education projects, such as promoting iNaturalist, an app that helps users to identify found animals and plants, and to record the finds into the international biodiversity database. However, he and his colleagues are happy to help those interested in implementing their own projects, from collecting data, evaluating environmental impact, researching a territory and identifying rare species, to training in any nature conservation aspect. Thus, in 2023 the UNCG experts helped Studenukivska hromada create one of regional landscape parks in Kyiv oblast. The CSO also closely worked with the Environment. People. Law organisation to prevent the construction of a wind farm in Polonyna Borzhava, a montane meadow in the Northeastern Carpathians.
Since the beginning of the full-scale war in Ukraine, Oleksii has been helping other scientists, environmentalists and other enthusiasts to save the data on registrations of biodiversity, which can be destroyed by the war. Thanks to him and his colleagues, more than 350,000 of such records were saved, digitalized and published, therefore becoming available for use of scientific community worldwide, and his Fellowship project, ‘Saving Biodiversity Data in Wartime’, has significantly contributed to the process.
Oleksii is modest when he sums up his achievements, “We managed to save some important biodiversity data. We supported the scientists and motivated them to keep their work. And we draw people’s attention to the problems of preserving biodiversity in Ukraine.” However, numbers do not lie. 10+ scientists trained within his project prepared and published 12 datasets on the GBIF platform, having saved more than 20,000 primary biodiversity records for international science, with 20% of the data coming from the occupied or de-occupied territories that suffered from military operations the most. Data from the datasets published within the fellowship project have already been used in 3 international scientific articles. Awareness raising and how-to materials created within the project reached almost 268,000 persons motivating new people to contribute their finds to the GBIF, iNaturalist and other open databases, thus expanding the public knowledge on the state of biodiversity and helping scientists and environmentalists to do their job more effectively and cover much bigger areas that are less accessible in wartimes.
When asked if he had any doubts about saving biodiversity in the middle of the war, Oleksii shrugs his shoulders. As an environmental activist with 10+ years of experience, he knows there is “never the right time when it comes to nature conservation projects”. And as a scientist, he knows that in the next years, these data will be used to assess and mitigate the environmental impact of the war in Ukraine. “The sooner the world will help us to oust the [Russian] invaders, the sooner we will be able to help our nature.”
| Country | Ukraine |
| The scope of | |
| Type of solution | |
| The technology used | |
| The budget development decisions | 0 |
Updates coming soon!
| Country | Ukraine |
| The scope of | |
| Type of solution | |
| The technology used | |
| The budget development decisions | 0 |
Updates coming soon!
| Country | Ukraine |
| The scope of | |
| Type of solution | |
| The technology used | |
| The budget development decisions | 0 |