Fellowship Programme
Country
Area of Interest
Topic
Updates coming soon!
| Country | Ukraine |
| The scope of | |
| Type of solution | |
| The technology used | |
| The budget development decisions | 0 |
Updates coming soon!
| Country | Armenia |
| 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 | Armenia |
| The scope of | |
| Type of solution | |
| The technology used | |
| The budget development decisions | 0 |
FANDY platform is a digital tool designed to help charities raise funds through donations and subscriptions, manage donors, and provide donation analytics. The platform includes a web builder for donation forms and fundraising pages, an admin dashboard, and management tools for donors (users donating money).
The platform’s user-friendly interface and range of features, such as the web builder and analytics dashboard, have contributed to its success. As more charities begin to use FANDY, its impact is set to grow, making it an essential tool for the fundraising community. Overall, FANDY has the potential to revolutionize the way charities raise funds and manage donations.
As a result of the Fellowship, charities in EaP countries got access to a modern-day fundraising service, which can help them raise more funds and make a greater impact in their respective fields. Additionally, this can help introduce new technologies and practices to the charity sector, which can help CSOs become more effective and efficient in their operations.
| Country | Belarus |
| The scope of | |
| Type of solution | |
| The technology used | |
| The budget development decisions | 0 |
In parallel with academic studies, with a MA in Social Work and a nearly completed Doctorate in Sociology, Gohar Khachatryan has charted her civic activism through a range of CSOs and Thinktanks in her native Armenia since 2016. She grew up in a provincial town and through voluntary work with a local CSO began to understand how vulnerable groups often have their rights ignored or abused. While pursuing her academic goals Gohar had the opportunity to study the dynamics of anti-discrimination. From 2018 to 2019 Gohar was a Research Fellow with the Public Policy Institute and under an EU-funded project ‘Pursuing Positive Change Through Empowering CSOs’ she analysed methods and toolkits for protecting against discrimination. Later, in 2022, Gohar spent time in Austria, supported by an Erasmus+ action, exploring mechanisms and practices for the prevention of gender-based violence and learning from challenges in the management of mental health services.
“When the call’ for applicants for the Civil Society Fellows came out in the second half of 2022, I saw a great opportunity for making a positive contribution to promote community-based approaches to mental healthcare in Armenia.”
Accordingly, Gohar set about to evaluate the policies and practices used in the establishment and operations of the first four innovative, post-Soviet ‘group homes’ in Armenia. These are residential homes for citizens who require support on specific mental health issues. The homes, in the regions of Ararat, Kotayk, Lori, and the capital Yerevan, were initially established though programmes of international organisations and now jointly run with the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs and cooperation with the local authorities. The long-term aim of the ‘homes’ is to support mental health sufferers to live independent lives in the community. As such, Gohar used her fellowship to look at the progress in a particular area – the extent to which the residents of the ‘group homes’ participate in local decision-making processes – and to facilitate a fully participatory research process involving the residents, the staff and management of the homes.
As a result of her fellowship, Gohar has helped to create a degree of momentum towards the goal of having ‘independent living’ as the guiding policy principle on mental healthcare provision. Having pioneered research on this subject, she has created a space for further research and investigation, and through debate on her research paper has ensured that the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs will endorse the paper’s recommendations. Furthermore, the Ministry for Territorial Infrastructure has agreed to disseminate the report to its local government communities in Armenia with the intention of inspiring them to take action to be more inclusive in their decision-making.
Download the Summary of the Research Report in English:
Are Community Decision-Making Processes Inclusive for a Person with a Disability?
With regard to the rights-holders in these ‘group homes’ Gohar has also noted positive changes. Residents are now aware of their rights and the management of the homes have a better understanding of how they can improve the protection of those rights. For example, there had been a previous practice for the management of the ‘group homes’ to confiscate and safeguard the passports of residents. But, through the consultative activities of Gohar’s research, residents and staff were able to learn about the importance and usefulness for residents to keep their own passports and consequently three of the ‘group homes’ have changed their policy on this issue.
Gohar also reported that there were other bright moments generated by the interaction with the residents. During the fellowship project Gohar wanted to create some visual products (posters and flyers) to raise awareness and promote the findings of the research.
“To do this we had a designer to come up with some visual drafts and then we showed these to the residents to ask for their opinions and ideas on how to finalize the products. The posters and flyers were duly made and at the fellowships final event the residents of the ‘group homes’ saw these outputs and were so pleased to see their ideas and suggestions incorporated. This was really empowerment in action.”
Gohar will be continuing her mission to support the protection of the rights of women and men with mental health issues and more broadly engage in the defence of rights of other vulnerable groups. “Being part of civil society is paramount to this process as it means that I can investigate and advocate without the restraints that may otherwise come if I was a State employee”. As part of this mission, Gohar, with other like-minded colleagues, set up a platform called ‘Change’. Gohar hopes that this organisation will be an effective addition to the rights protection architecture in Armenia and is proud that its first advocacy action was to promote the findings from her fellowship project.
| Country | Armenia |
| 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 |
“Civic activism is an opportunity to give back to society, something you often cannot fully do in your professional work”, says Vitalii Razik, 2021 EaP Civil Society Fellow from Lviv, Ukraine, who has been combining a successful legal practice with civic work for the past 23 years.
Civic activism for Vitalii started when he and his fellows at Ivan Franko National University established the Association of Law Students in 1995. Shortly after his graduation, Vitalii started working with Lviv-based Law and Democracy Foundation, first as a pro bono lawyer and since 2010 as director of the Foundation. Soon Vitalii realized that providing legal consultations to citizens was not enough, as most problems stemmed from more systematic faults of the Ukrainian legislation and practice. Thus, the Foundation expanded its activities, adding to its mandate human rights protection, access to justice, legal and court reforms, monitoring of the penitentiary system and its reform, preventing and counteracting corruption.
Had it not been for an event in 2010 that changed everything, the Foundation would have been working today the same way as hundreds of other smaller-scale CSOs in Ukraine. But in 2010 the Foundation’s lawyers helped Ivan Samardak from Lviv to win his case against Ukraine at the European Court of Human Rights. It was a successful story with plenty of lessons learnt, and Vitalii wanted to share their experience with lawyers in other regions, who dealt with similar cases and problems.
“Working with civil society organisations was the most efficient way of sharing this important information”, recollects Vitalii. For the Foundation, it was the first action focused on experience sharing. “We established good communication with the organisations, and realised that acting as a network benefits every organisation, as we can mutually share our best practices, and then apply and further distribute them in our regions, thus acting as catalysts.”
In 2012 the first twelve human rights CSOs – partners of the Foundation – signed a memorandum of cooperation and established a network to coordinate human rights activities and disseminate experience to strengthen Ukrainian civil society and CSOs. Today, the Network of Human Rights NGOs has about 20 active member CSOs from 8 Ukrainian oblasts, “Cooperation between CSOs creates a more effective civil society, opportunities to share experience, helps to solve problems and engage communities to address systematic problems.”
In 2018 the Foundation co-founded another network, Toloka Coalition of Regional Initiatives. Three years later, in 2021 Vitalii received the EaP Civil Society Fellowship award, with a project idea to assist and inspire local CSOs, first of all members of the two Foundation’s networks, in preventing corruption at the grassroots level. He was about to start his fellowship when Russia commenced the full-scale war in Ukraine. Corruption did not disappear, but priorities changed.
Among other numerous challenges, Ukraine had to deal with the refugee crises unprecedented in recent history. People were coming to western Ukraine in the thousands, and needed all kinds of assistance: humanitarian, informational, legal, psychological. “Before the government managed to stabilise the system to make it functional, there was no one except civil society to provide support to internally displaced Ukrainians,” says Vitalii. Many of those CSOs had little or no experience of working with IDPs, and Vitalii saw an immediate need to help these organisations adapt their activities and practices to the realities and needs of war.
Vitalii’s project included several components: training civil society activists in providing legal and psychological support to IDPs, media outreach and advocating for IDPs’ issues at local level, consulting CSOs on legal issues, e.g., related with martial law, and on psychological aspects of CSOs’ work in crisis, running awareness and information campaigns, etc. “Before providing much needed help to others, the organisations needed to be trained in how to do that properly,” says Vitalii. It was inspiring to see that activists who had come to the trainings feeling lost found the focus and started supporting IDPs successfully and tackling other urgent problems.
His approach proved its effectiveness: by the end of the Fellowship project in October 2022, 17 participating CSOs reported they had provided support to over 8,000 IDPs, and the number of beneficiaries was increasing. Vitalii explains, “If I had decided to help IDPs directly, I would have been able to help only very few. This approach allowed me to help thousands.”
The network of CSOs supporting IDPs in Western Ukraine established within the Fellowship project continues working today, with members and individual activists keeping in touch and helping each other when needed.
“In my opinion, civic and charity organisations are the basis of civil society, and we must keep working on enabling them to mature as after our victory [in the war] civil society will become the driver of Ukraine’s reconstruction and development processes on its road to further European integration.”
| Country | Ukraine |
| The scope of | |
| Type of solution | |
| The technology used | |
| The budget development decisions | 0 |
| Country | Ukraine |
| The scope of | |
| Type of solution | |
| The technology used | |
| The budget development decisions | 0 |