Beyond the Headlines: Discovering Hope and Resilience in Wartime Ukraine 

By Myra Dahgaypaw on August 11, 2025

When I crossed the Ukrainian border for the first time in July, I expected to find a country defined by conflict. What I discovered instead were ordinary people creating extraordinary change, refusing to let war diminish their commitment to building a better world. 

Heroes Without Headlines 

My journey began at the Women’s Information Consultative Center’s 30th anniversary symposium in the beautiful city of Zhovkva in the Lviv region. Most important to me was reuniting with a friend who had taught me about women’s leadership in my early twenties—someone I hadn’t seen for more than twenty years. Watching activists reunite, their joy undiminished by circumstances, I realized this wasn’t just organizational planning—it was about the unbreakable bonds that sustain movements for justice. 

In Lviv, I met the quiet heroes of Women’s March who transformed a two-bedroom apartment into a lifeline for fifteen internally displaced persons. Despite funding cuts, they guide traumatized families through bureaucratic mazes, help displaced mothers find employment, and create healing spaces through art therapy and poetry sessions. Their unwavering commitment stems from something more powerful than paychecks: the knowledge that their community needs them. 

Confronting Uncomfortable Truths 

My most challenging day came in Mukachevo, where I encountered Ukraine’s largely invisible Roma community—14,000 people facing systematic discrimination that predates the war. Here, families live next to garbage dumps while children with brilliant minds are denied education and skilled workers are barred from employment—all because of their ethnicity. 

Yet even in the face of such injustice, I found remarkable innovation. Young Roma women started a beauty business, traveling to clients when they weren’t welcome in traditional salons. Women gathered around sewing machines, creating not just clothing but economic independence. 

The Power of Small Investments 

What gives me the most hope is how achievable meaningful change really is. For less than $12,000, we could establish a sewing enterprise transforming dozens of women’s economic prospects. For the cost of a single conference, we could create an educational center serving 25 Roma children currently denied schooling. 

These aren’t just donations—they’re investments in systematically suppressed human potential. The return isn’t just economic; it’s the reclamation of dignity and creation of opportunity pathways that were never supposed to exist. UUSC’s seed grants are strategic investments designed to make these transformative impacts. 

An Invitation to Act 

I returned from Ukraine connected to profound possibility—not naive optimism, but hard-won knowledge that committed people can create islands of hope that eventually become continents of change. 

Ukrainian civil society demonstrates that ordinary people can create extraordinary change when they refuse to believe that suffering is inevitable. We often feel overwhelmed by the scale of global problems, but Ukraine taught me differently: transformation happens through small acts of courage, sustained over time, by people who refuse to accept that the way things are is the way they must be. 

In a small Lviv office, displaced families rebuild lives. In a Mukachevo community center, Roma women claim economic independence. In symposium rooms across Ukraine, activists plan for a future extending far beyond this crisis. 

They’re not waiting for permission or perfect conditions. They’re creating the change they want to see, one person, one project, one act of courage at a time. 

And that, more than any headline, is what hope looks like in practice. 

Small donations to grassroots Ukrainian civil society can have outsized impact—serving as investments in both immediate relief and long-term vision for a more just world. Help fund UUSC’s seed grants today and invest in a future of collective liberation.