Lifeline Ukraine has provided 100,000 Instances Of support to Ukrainians in Need
Well, it’s not often that you cross two major milestones in the space of a single week! On October 14 th Lifeline Ukraine marked 5 years since we began our mission, to mark the occasion friends, supporters, journalists, partners, and donors gathered at the Ukrainian Danish Youth House in Kyiv.
Two major milestones hit in a week
In the presentation for that gathering, we had left a placeholder text noting that we had, at that time, “provided almost 100,000 instances of support.” An hour before we gathered, I obtained the actual figure.
99,610, as of 13:14 on 14/10/24
At the present time Lifeline Ukraine is able to provide an average of about 4,000 instances of support per month, though the demand is higher that is the limitation of our current capacity with current resources, that equates to 133 per day. So, this blog will be published when we hit 100,000, October 21th.
The Principle of One
However, at Lifeline Ukraine we have always operated something that we dubbed “The Principle of One.” What matters the most to us is one call, and that is the call that any one of our Consultants is focused on in that particular moment. Each of the numbers here are not statistics, they are people, they are our brothers and sisters, our classmates and work colleagues. That is how we see the people who seek our help, that is why they find the empathetic care that they need when they contact us. Because, in that moment, we dedicate ourselves to every single individual that is seeking our help in dark times.
While The Principle of One has remained a constant in our thinking of how we approach our hotline work, in many other ways Lifeline Ukraine has evolved over the past five years. The hotline remains, will always be, our core activity. That is where we help people in real time, 24/7. But our wider task has always been to look at all kinds of innovations and additional tools that we can use in various ways to bring down the suicide rate in Ukraine.
Increasingly, training has become a key element of our activities as well. At one point our training seminars were funded through a grant from the Australian Embassy in Kyiv. When a group, be it a business or a newsroom or a university group, asked us to talk to them about how they can recognise signs that raise alarms about how a friend might be coping, and then how to open a conversation with that person in a safe and confident manner, we did that, and the Australian Embassy picked up the tab.
We have also undertaken a series of in-person trainings for doctors, psychologists, and social workers in various regions of Ukraine in partnership with the International Medical Corps. Through that partnership we trained 193 people in 8 cities in southern and eastern Ukraine.
Social media presence and our website
Another recent update is to our social media presence and our website. Based on our need to ensure that Lifeline Ukraine is known on a national level, to 40 million people, is a job for experts and so we have always worked with a firm called Veedoo. They freshened up the Social Media team 6 months ago and a new design style was created for our digital presence. The new version of the Lifeline Ukraine website, also created by Veedoo, went live on our birthday.
Two final messages to close out this blog…
First, what you will see from us very soon is an appeal for your help. Here’s the facts. The demand for support from Lifeline Ukraine is currently 6,500 requests (through phone and chat) per month, and we are able to help only 4,000 of those. 4,000 is a lot, of course, but we need to grow to be able to help all of those 6,500 who need us. Any one of those cases could be critical. We need to Close The Gap from providing 67% of the help that we are asked to, to providing 100%. We will do this in stages.
The first stage is to add one more Consultant to our peak shift, from 18:00 to 24:00 every evening.
Adding those working hours is going to cost $2,000 per month, so that is our first goal. And then we will see how much we have Closed The Gap and decide on how to Close The Gap further and further until it no longer exists. Donors, large and small, will have various platforms and options through which they can support us in supporting the people of Ukraine. Oh, the good news? We made a head start and we are already one quarter of the way there! Our monthly donations through Patreon currently stands at almost $500.
Our gratitude
Finally, I want to close with an adaptation of an Irish saying. A traditional Irish greeting is “cead mile failte”, meaning 100 thousand welcomes. I want to say 100,000 thank yous. Thank you to every one of the people on the other side of those 100,000 interactions, thank you for your trust. Thank you for reaching out. Thank you for allowing us to help. We hope that the need doesn’t arise again, but know that we are here for you, 24/7, as in the past. As in the present. As in the future.