Johns Hopkins MBA & Husband Organize Effort To Help Individual Ukrainians

How long were you out of contact with her? And is she OK for right now?

Mike: Thank God, yes. They escaped, basically, during those few times the corridors were allowed and they weren’t shooting people who were trying to get out. They got to the capital, I don’t know how, but it took them like 12 hours instead of 20 minutes to get there. 

Some of my friends stayed in the suburbs where I grew up, which is on the east side of Kyiv. To explain, the north side was completely occupied and destroyed because they were trying to get into the capital. But, in my city, they stopped the Russian troops in the villages around that city. So they’ve occupied those territories, but didn’t get in. But they did, indeed, bomb the military bases and some infrastructure in my town as well. 

That’s how my brother woke up at 5 a.m. because he heard the explosions. So, yeah, some of my friends left and are scattered around Ukraine and Europe at the moment–including my cousin with his mom. I had family on the east side, where the war took place eight years prior, but was sort of calm-ish for the past, let’s say 30 days, and lately they’re shifting there, so they evacuated as well in time. So everybody’s safe right now.

What about your grandparents? How are they doing?

Mike: The sirens are going off like three times a day to go into the shelter, but they stopped doing that because it is too cold for them. They are grandparents. So, they are just hiding in the little hallways between apartments in their building. It’s warmer now, but it was freezing there.

How do you deal with that kind of uncertainty day to day, not knowing what’s happening, and having lives back here in the states?

Mike: Well, the first two days I had a breakdown and I buried everybody in my mind, because my mom passed away just a year ago. It was not like history repeating, but the fear of losing everybody else. Then, I started to pull myself together because I want to be in touch with them. They don’t have enough, I don’t know, places to draw energy from to just get through the day, and I want to be at least that outlet for them. So I think like 90%, 95% of everything is blocked out of my mind just to deal with that, but I still have those days when I go completely numb.

Jon: I think now, because we feel like it’s a little calmer in Kyiv and the West, we might sound a certain way, but the first 40 days we had constant anxiety and stress. We are both full time students, so going to school worried for these people that now I love too,  but also because (Mike’s) been through so much and imagining that something can happen. 

Every morning you’d wake up expecting the worst, but holding out for maybe some kind of hope. But there wasn’t any sign of hope. Every morning you woke up it got worse and worse and worse. Then when the tanks were closing in on Kyiv, it was so scary and we were having to take tests and go to meetings. It was like being a zombie. It was horrible, and it still is. I think all of the things that we’re doing with fundraising and volunteering, it’s really to turn the despair into some sort of productivity. We know it’s a tiny drop in a tiny bucket. It’s just more about how do we channel this energy into something productive aside from just crying all day?

Tell us how the effort got started?

Mike: I think the first few days, we were just gathering information–like are they going to be alive or not. Afterwards, I had an idea to create something for people to send money directly to the bank cards of people we knew there who were suffering. It was sort of out of desperation, feeling like we have to do something, and because we’re able to network here, ask people around us to give what they could.

Jon: It came in stages. The first thing was we set a crazy number goal. We were clear that it was for our friends and family at first. So we set a $10,000 limit and obviously everybody wanted to help, so we met the goal. Then we were like, “Okay. Well, if we can raise $10,000 in a few days, let’s see what else we can raise for other people, people we don’t know.” 

We started to get connected with other people in Ukraine through Instagram, like families who were leaving and going to Poland, families who were staying, people who were in the heart of the danger, and people who weren’t but who couldn’t work anymore. So, we just kept raising. We ended up raising like $30,000.

Then, we had this idea of breaking down a barrier between donor and donee. At first, there was so much work because we were finding families, finding people to donate, then sending notes in between them to coordinate the donation and to make people feel connected. 

Then things started to quiet down here in America. I think people just get tired, right? It’s like more bad news and more bad news, but we didn’t want them to lose sight of what was still happening. Maybe because I’m one removed, I kept thinking, “Why is this all I think about, but everyone else is just in class pretending life is normal?” I thought maybe they needed a personal connection. So we set up a Zoom call with our friends in Ukraine and people here. They just talked with people and explained what was going on. And then we were able to set up a chain of volunteers.  

Tells us about your volunteers in Ukraine?

Mike: It started with Yaroslav and Oksana (Syzonenko). I grew up with Oksana, and now they’re married.

Jon: Men between ages 18 and 60 can’t leave the country, so some couples decided to stay together. I think Yaroslav really wanted to know that Oksana was safe, so she went to Poland. He went to the West in Ukraine. So it started like a chain of volunteers where Oksana and her friend, Mariia, would gather humanitarian aid, get it to West Ukraine–either through a truck driver or train or however they could. Then Yaroslav would put it on the train to Kyiv, and his friend would get it in Kyiv and distribute it. 

It became a huge sense of purpose for Yaroslav at a terrifying time when his wife was in another country, and he might get drafted into an impossible war. He’s really the heart and soul of the operation. And our job now is to get him money.

Next page: Video with people from all 50 U.S. states + $30,000 raised so far