Help the helpers: Partners’ psycho-social support and capacity building in the times of war

Since the full-scale invasion, civil society has carried much of Ukraine’s crisis response. Volunteering has become a mass civic act — 74 percent of Ukrainians say they have volunteered at least once since 2022. Behind that figure are first responders, evacuation teams, helping professionals, and volunteers working with war-affected children and adults alike.

Years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many of them are still active, as helping professionals, in NGOs or initiatives. They continue to help while living under the same conditions they respond to: air raids, losses, and uncertainty. That double exposure makes them vulnerable to stress and trauma. Latest research confirmed that humanitarian workers carry higher rates of depression, anxiety, and PTSD than the general population (Frontiers in Psychology, 2025).

Changing to a way of helping that keeps healthy boundaries and does not harm one’s own condition is difficult. There is always someone worse off, the logic goes, so who am I to stop, rest, or ask for anything? Rest starts to feel like a betrayal of the mission; naming one’s limits feels like failing it. The cost of helping stays quiet until it surfaces as exhaustion and burnout.

Exhaustion rarely stays contained. When demand keeps pressing on people already running low, the strain spreads through the organization — surfacing as overwork, tighter control, less transparency, and tense communication — and travels from one person to the next. And as more helpers deplete, so does the capacity of civil society to protect the people who depend on it.

Our goal is strong and healthy helpers who can keep doing what they have chosen to do — supporting children, youth and other vulnerable groups, facilitating local resilience and development, keeping up critical services and saving lives. Through them, a civil society that stays vibrant and able to protect.

Treating rest and self-regulation not as a reward earned after the work and seldom provided, but as the professional ground the work stands on, we help those who hold the support structure together to adapt habits, structures and work flows that prevent them from running empty.

Together with our partner Somatic Experiencing Ukraine, we accompany over 350 NGO staff and volunteers from more than 25 Ukrainian organizations. At the heart of the project are six-day retreats in the Carpathian Mountains: removed from the places of bombing, in clean air and wild nature, participants can sleep again and begin to rebuild the healthy habits war has worn away.

Regular training, mentoring and body-oriented movement sessions keep the practice alive. Instead of preaching healthy habits in the abstract, they work directly with the obstacles that make self-care so hard in wartime — the endless demand, the guilt, and the constant activation that makes resting feel uncomfortable.

Helpers who want to break unhealthy cycles can work with Somatic Experiencing Practitioners on their self-regulation skills in individual psycho-social support sessions.

A weekly newsletter — with topics like personal boundaries, perfectionism or the inner critic, many suggested by readers — takes on the difficult and dilemma-laden parts of helping that people rarely speak about and supports continuity in self-monitoring and self-care.