ForPEACE

More pictures and reflections from HART Recovery Center’s first family and couples retreat!

One year ago, with forPEACE's support, the frontline village of Zorya — just outside occupied Enerhodar in Zaporizhzhia — built a small facility for sorting and baling household waste. This August, our partners took stock of what a year of that work has added up to.

More than 2 tonnes of plastic, glass, paper, and cardboard sorted by residents, baled by the project team, and sent for recycling. Around ₴14,000 earned — and every hryvnia reinvested: transport for the recyclables, strapping tape for the baler, and art supplies for the children's creative workshop in the bomb shelter.

Sort → bale → sell → reinvest in the community. It's no longer a one-off cleanup; it's a system that keeps running.

And alongside it, the everyday work that keeps a village whole: mowing and pruning, new benches at the highway bus stop, watering young trees, cleaning water tanks and maintaining drinking-water filters, preparing housing for displaced families, helping neighbors with limited mobility, and getting kids out on cleanups so they learn that "Zorya is our shared home."

Thank you to everyone who makes this possible. 💙💛

This July, our partners Сільська благодійна організація "Зоря" on the ground in Зорянський старостинський округ Мирівської ОТГ kept a community going — one that sits just outside occupied Enerhodar in Zaporizhzhia. With forPEACE's support, the local charity "Zorya" provides salaries to local families who mowed and cleared public spaces, cared for young plantings, delivered drinking water to neighbors who can't carry it themselves, prepared housing for displaced families, and kept building out the shelter beneath the House of Culture.

They even turned trash into hope: residents sorted and baled household waste for recycling, earning ₴14,000 (about $340) that goes right back into the village. Kids watered the hibiscus bushes and watched the first flowers bloom.

This is what your support makes possible — not just a cleaner town, but a community that keeps choosing to care for itself and each other. 💙💛

We're deeply honored to share this post from our partners at Об’єднання Відповідальних Громадян (Union of Responsible Citizens).

This past week, Lena Contor — a Ukrainian-American from Pocatello, Idaho came to visit various projects that she and her community from City of Pocatello - City Hall have fundraised to support. What began for Lena five years ago as a trip to Poland to help displaced Ukrainians at the border has turned into an international community-to-community friendship connecting Pocatello to various partners and projects across Dnipropetrovsk to nearly the frontline zones of Kherson (and Kharkiv, but that's for another post!).

In Kryvyi Rih, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, Lena and her Pocatello community spearheaded fundraised to support HART Recovery Space (ГАРТ - простір відновлення) a rehabilitation center providing comprehensive care for veterans and their family as well as surviving spouses and spouses and family of Ukrainians soldiers missing in action and/or in captivity.

While HART is a three story facility providing psychological and physical rehabilitation services, HART is more than a building. It's the nucleus for an entire community-wide ecosystem addressing the needs of a population traumatized by five years of war with the vision that their community is prepared to not just rehabilitate but "revitalize" each other as Juliy Morozov, the co-founder of HART, puts it.

This entire social ecosystem extends beyond the rooms of their physical and psychological program. It includes horse therapy sessions, a public art hall, and partnerships with other grassroots initiatives across the city and country. A taste of which was shown and shared with Lena on her recent visit.

Thanks to the generosity, proactivity, and care of the everyday people of Pocatello, forPEACE was able to remain a primary partner in the ongoing construction of HART (ГАРТ).

To our partners: thank you! None of this happens without people willing to stand alongside one another, story by story, brick by brick.

Thank you Lena Contor, thank you City of Pocatello - City Hall and thank you Об’єднання Відповідальних Громадян for your dedicated work caring for your war wounded and vision to make sure those suffering from the visible or invisible scars of war in your community do not fall through the cracks unnoticed and uncared for.

Разом ми будуємо. Together we build. 🇺🇦
Not tomorrow. Not when the war is over.
These are people who were already building yesterday.
These are people who think in terms of now.

(n.b. in which we learned that бац (pronounced b-ah-ts) is a Ukrainian onomatopoeia for a sudden sound!)

Thank you again, Bountiful City UT, for the opportunity to join your Pioneer Parade and celebrate a pioneer spirit that knows no borders!

Thank you to all who participated and how special to now share these videos and photos with our partners in liberated Novovorontsovka, Kherson Ukraine.

Americans are with you, Ukraine! And now, more know that Novovorontsovka is particularly proud of their watermelons. ;)

Нововоронцовська селищна військова адміністрація

Thank you! Bountiful City UT and Kate Bradshaw for Bountiful City!

Нововоронцовська селищна військова адміністрація 💛💙