“We were growing faster than we had time to reflect”: how a strategic session helped the team find a shared direction and internal resilience

For more than 15 years, Public Resources and Initiatives Charity Foundation operated as a local organization focused on activities in the city of Chernivtsi and Chernivtsi region. However, over the past two years, the Foundation’s team has grown significantly — both in the scale of its work and in its geographic reach. Today, the organization works systematically with communities in 10 regions of Ukraine — Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv, Zhytomyr, Chernivtsi, Donetsk, Chernihiv, Sumy, Zaporizhzhia, and Kryvyi Rih regions — responding to humanitarian challenges caused by the full-scale war.

This growth was rapid and demanding. The team operated in conditions of constant uncertainty driven by the full-scale invasion: fluctuating security situations across regions, unstable access to communities, urgent humanitarian needs, and the necessity to continuously adapt plans.

On a daily basis, the team made operational management and programmatic decisions under severe time and resource constraints — related to prioritizing assistance, distributing workloads, logistics, and safety. Working simultaneously across multiple regions of Ukraine with different humanitarian, social, and security contexts, as well as responding to diverse community needs, required a high level of focus, flexibility, and mutual trust within the team.

The Foundation’s President, Olena Tanasiichuk, recalls that after the start of the full-scale invasion and during the period of rapid expansion into new regions, there emerged a clear need to rethink the organization’s work and look at it more broadly:

“We held on thanks to resilience and mutual support. But at a certain point, I clearly felt that we needed a deep understanding of where we were heading next — not just reacting to challenges, but consciously building the organization’s future.”

When Growth Becomes a Challenge

The team of Public Resources and Initiatives Charity Foundation consists of 24 people — staff members and volunteers — who together form a multidisciplinary and diverse community. These are women and men of different professions, life experiences, and nationalities, united by a shared mission: supporting people and communities affected by the war.

At the same time, this growth and diversity began to generate internal challenges: differing views on roles, areas of responsibility, and priorities. Without a clear shared framework, there was a growing risk of burnout, overload of individual team members, and loss of strategic focus.

A Strategic Session as a Turning Point

In November 2025, within the framework of the project “Institutional Capacity Strengthening of "Public Resources and Initiatives Charity Foundation"”, implemented with the technical support of UN Women in Ukraine and funded by the Women’s Peace and Humanitarian Fund (WPHF), the Foundation held a three-day offline strategic planning session.

“Strategic planning became not a formality for us, but an honest conversation — about values, roles, responsibilities, and boundaries. About how to work together without losing ourselves,” explains Olena Tanasiichuk.

Team members from different regions of Ukraine took part in the session. Over the course of three days, the team worked on shaping a shared vision for the Foundation’s development, aligning values, strategic priorities, and internal processes.

The process was challenging, but necessary.

“It was a difficult but very important stage. We listened to one another a lot, sometimes disagreed, searched for common ground. And it was precisely through this process that a sense of unity began to take shape,” Olena shares.

Changes That Stayed With the Team

As a result of the strategic session, the Foundation’s team gained not only a strategic development plan but also tangible internal changes. Work became more structured, roles clearer, and processes more transparent for the entire team.

“We became more coordinated and more confident in our decisions. There is now a clear understanding of priorities and of who is responsible for what,” notes the Foundation’s President.

As an organization where more than 75% of the team are women, the Foundation consciously builds its work on principles of equality, inclusion, and partnership-based leadership.

“For me, this is about respect, trust, and recognizing the value of each person’s contribution. This approach creates resilience — both human and organizational,” says Olena Tanasiichuk.

Impact Beyond the Organization

This internal transformation directly strengthened the Foundation’s ability to work with communities in complex humanitarian contexts. A clearer structure, shared vision, and trust within the team make it possible to make faster decisions on the ground, coordinate actions across regions, and flexibly reallocate resources in response to the evolving needs of communities. This helps the organization respond more effectively to people’s needs while preventing overload among individual team members.

“Today, I see a team that does not rely on individual ‘heroes,’ but on a shared vision and trust. We have grown not only in scale, but also in maturity. And this is where strong and responsible organizations begin,” Olena concludes.

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The project “Institutional Capacity Strengthening of "Public Resources and Initiatives Charity Foundation"” is implemented by Public Resources and Initiatives Charity Foundation funded by The United Nations Women’s Peace and Humanitarian Fund (WPHF) with technical support of UN Women Ukraine.). WPHF is a flexible and rapid financing mechanism that supports high-quality initiatives aimed at strengthening the capacity of local women in conflict prevention, crisis response, emergency situations, and the use of key peacebuilding opportunities.

This publication is produced with funding from the United Nations Women’s Peace and Humanitarian Fund (WPHF), however, the views expressed and content included do not imply official endorsement or acceptance by the United Nations.