One Proposal for Ukraine: Our Jesuit Coordinated Response

Following the intuition of Pope Francis, in the face of this drama of millions of people who are forced to leave their lands because of war and violence, our common response should be articulated around four verbs: “welcome, protect, promote and integrate”.

The Jesuit response to the Ukraine emergency continues to take shape with the coordinated work of multiple countries and organizations involved in its development. As is already known, we are deploying actions in Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Hungary and Slovakia, under the overall coordination of the Jesuit Refugee Service and the Xavier Network. 

The Jesuits leading the local responses are Fr. Vitaly Osmolovski (Poland), Fr. Oleksii Bredeliev (Ukraine), Fr. Marius Talos (Romania), Fr. Sajgo Szabolcs (Hungary) and Fr. Jakub Garcar (Slovakia). Every Friday we are having a general coordination meeting accompanied by JRS and Xavier Network Team. The Assistant General, Fr. Tomasz Kot, also participates, ensuring the link with the Jesuit governance. 

In addition to this general coordination team, there are now international working teams for program management, fundraising, security, communication and advocacy, which meet at different frequencies to ensure coordination and the various products and services around the emergency. 

From March 20 to April 11, our colleagues Pilar Lopez (Emergencies Xavier Network) and Irene Guia (JRS Consultant) have been visiting the projects in the field in a first approach for the projection of needs and possible responses in the medium and long term. From May 9 to 15, Alberto Ares, SJ (JRS Europe Director) and Dani Villanueva, SJ (Entreculturas Director and Xavier Network Emergency Coordinator) have been making an institutional visit to Poland, Romania and Ukraine to ensure the increasing coherence and structure of the coordinated response. 

In this way, the progressive coordination of immediate response actions is giving way to the design of a comprehensive proposal integrating all humanitarian response actions around the four verbs of Pope Francis to summarize how our response should be: welcome, protect, promote and integrate refugees. 

The global program, which has already been called “One Proposal” encompasses the four dimensions as follows. (a) Reception (“to welcome”), providing temporary shelter, food and other essentials, transportation, operation of call centers, (b) protection, providing safe shelter, food and other essentials, legal assistance, psychosocial support, education and health, (c) advocacy, addressing the education and livelihood needs of refugees and (d) integration helping reconciliation and awareness raising through educational, communication, advocacy and accompaniment actions. 

The response of the Jesuit global solidarity network is proving to be extraordinary, having already exceeded 5 million euros in global fundraising. The intervention and accompaniment strategies for the short and medium term are leading us to project a three-year proposal with a budget for which we still need more support. All Jesuit conferences, NGO’s and mission and development offices are aligned on this common response. If you want to donate all the these national links are in support of this common response: 

• Australia – Jesuit Mission
• Austria – Jesuiten Weltweit 
• Belgium – JRS Europe 
• Canada – Canadian Jesuits International
• Germany – Jesuiten Weltweit 
• Italy – JRS International 
• Perú y resto de Latinoamérica y Caribe – Misión Jesuita
• Spain – Entreculturas and Alboan  
• UK – Jesuit Missions
• USA – JRS USA 

It is a privilege being able to count on the continued solidarity of so many foundations and generous people who trust in the work of the Society of Jesus. On behalf of all the people we serve, many thanks and God bless you all.