Cards for Ukraine (Day 81)
The website is live! Huge thanks to Mario Zechner & team for taking us digital and allowing the €50 per family grocery card distribution project to scale up across Austria to meet the huge demand.
Our grocery card distribution website is live! Less than one month after I took my first trip to the grocery store with a half dozen Ukrainian women in Vienna, we have an actual functional website in four languages (!) thanks to Mario Zechner and his team. As I explained yesterday, I have been distributing €50 grocery store card gift cards to Ukrainian families in Austria, a project I began after weeks of volunteering at the main train station in Vienna, and learning now many Ukrainians were struggling to afford food here in Austria (savings running out, prices high, state aid insufficient and/or not paid yet).
I’ve been doing things old school. I started by posting in a few social media groups (a Russian-language Facebook group for moms in Austria that now has several thousand Ukrainian members, regional Telegram groups for each Austrian Bundesland for Ukrainian refugees) and shared my micro project with my fellow volunteer translators.
Word of mouth spread, but the volume was still not the same as if you suddenly announced the project online to essentially every Ukrainian in Austria (99% of them are online a LOT of the time on their phones). Today, that changed.
Mario built a simple to use website that allows both super quick and easy financial contributions towards us buying the supermarket gift cards (you can donate from almost anywhere in the world if you have a credit card or PayPal!) and Ukrainians in Austria can easily apply for cards. They have to share their address, number of family members, date of arrival, and a little bit of info about themselves. This helps keep everyone honest and also allows us to prioritise the most needy cases. This is what I have been doing anyway, but old fashioned style, in 1-on-1 chats, texting with the Ukrainians who write me, usually over Messenger or Telegram. The website allows us to replicate the process while hopefully scaling up and reaching more families. We had a few kinks today, but they were really minor, and by this evening, we had an incredibly long list of families asking for our help. Across Austria. Just like my handwritten envelopes. The demand is huge. The Austrian state has dropped the ball, big time. This Austrian public TV report last night didn’t give the impression that will change anytime soon, either:
I continue to manually send out cards. I receive many in the post each weekday, and I still have donations to spend. Mario and his team are working in tandem. We started via a “soft launch” in the Tirol and Vorarlberg Telegram groups this morning, and within half an hour some clever cat had posted in the national group and I thought to myself, how naive I was that I thought we could keep this “small” for the first few hours. No such luck. Of course they all figured it out! And fast.
Demand is huge. Mario shared with me the exact figures tonight, and it is truly astounding. We also received many donations on day one, thank you all so much. But to say it like it is: we are going to need a heck of a lot more. I continue to work off my own pipeline, and Mario and his team are facing a very long list. We are only sending one card per family (1-4 people), and trying to prioritise families with children, but of course none of us want to have to turn anyone down. We are only offering €50 of groceries. We are not solving any of the long-term structural problems. We are simply holding a bucket under a leaky roof but the roof must be repaired, and soon. We both stopped to ponder this story for a minute today. There are so many stories.
And this is the crux of the problem. This is my elevator pitch explanation for why everything is messed up right now:
The government could solve this with money, housing and jobs. Instead, volunteers try and line buckets under a roof leaking all over the place. Today, while waiting for my youngest to play in a golf tournament, I stuffed envelopes, answered messages, addressed and stamped new envelopes, posted about local job opportunities, connected two Austrian families with two Ukrainian families about long-term housing (crossing my figures but I have a really good feeling about both situations), texted with a mom in Salzburg about delivering rice cookers to the other moms in the “hotel”, bought McDonalds 15x €10 cards for tomorrow, drove home, addressed more envelopes, went downtown to meet moms of young kids from Mariupol and Dnipro now living in a dorm in Burgenland, and a family from Kharkiv living in a Vienna refugee hotel, introduced young moms to another Russian-speaking mom who can send them some more supplies with online delivery (buddy system takes me out of the equation), stumbled upon a pro-Ukraine march, came home exhausted, cooked dinner, baked a quick cake, answered more messages, tweeted a bit, told Andrey (name changed) in a wheelchair I will call him tomorrow morning.
Andrey reached out to me today. He wants to talk. It sounds very serious. He got my name and number from another resident of the dorm. She passed a Hofer card to him from me. The entire dorm of 400 people in the 11th district has ben told they have to move on Wednesday and no one knows where to yet and you can imagine how nervous they all must be. I promised to call Andrey tomorrow morning when I have energy to listen. In between running to the post office and Hofer and … you get the idea. Tomorrow afternoon I will meet a large group of parents from that worrying small hotel in the middle-of-nowhere Lower Austria where they aren’t being fed properly. 50 people live there. At least half of them have written me by now.
Then I finally sat down to write this.
Our lives are forever changed, too:
And that was Sunday. And that is every day. But this digitalisation is a wonder. Because it means we will no longer be limited by how fast I can physically address envelopes and answer texts. I am really optimistic. I have been overwhelmed since the beginning by the generosity of individual donors, and I hope this will continue, even as the “refugee” stories disappear from the headlines.
Huge thank you to Mario and his team for making a reality what I kept telling him I didn’t have any time to deal with (I was too busy texting with Ukrainians, running to Hofer to buy more cards, and hand-addressing envelopes! And dealing with one-offs. And there are a lot of them. And you get sucked in. And the train station. And giving the media time in the hope the message gets out…). Mario literally managed the whole website development by himself and only requested one 30 minute phone call of me. Phenomenal. Nothing in life is ever like that, except, when finally, it is. Forever grateful.
This is only the beginning.
Thank you. Danke. Дякую. Спасибо.
Cards for Ukraine (Day 81)
Do you have a preference for how donations are made (via the website / @groceries4Ukraine)? I was checking the functionality of the website, and when I checked the ‘donate via debit / credit card’ option, it displayed ‘Donations to this recipient aren't supported in this country’ (I am from India). I made a donation (@groceries4Ukraine) on May 14th. I will donate again next month. If you prefer through website, I will send it via paypal on the website.
In the post on Day 65 (Long Haul), you had written ‘I am thinking a lot about a buddy system. Each local family adopts a Ukrainian family they check in on.’ Today, on twitter you had asked whether anyone in Vienna would like to directly help two sisters from Ukraine with eleven kids.
In March, I read about people using Airbnb to directly transfer cash to Ukrainian families in need. Airbnb soon suspended listings posted after the war started, but before that almost 20 million dollars had been transferred to Ukrainian families in a month!
Is it possible to create something on the website similar to Dunbar’s friendship circles? It is anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s concept that human beings can approximately maintain 150 relationships. It breaks down as 5-10-35-100. The first five are one’s closest relationships (partner, family); the next ten are close friends. These are the people who are most likely to help out an individual in times of distress.
After you prioritize the most needy cases, individual donors (Austrian / International) can sign up to help particular families (10 donors per family?) and payments from donors to the website will be allocated to these families? Or each family can create their own paypal account and you can list it as verified on the website (with some details about the family) and donors can send money to that account. Also maybe, some mechanism of communicating between the family and friend (provide email id of family to donor by email?), so that they can talk to each other (similar to Airbnb)?
If writing new programs for the website is not feasible, maybe you can choose families and give details about them (family situation; paypal account) on twitter / substack and readers can chose who to help.
As one grocery card per family will not solve all problems, friends who contribute monthly will help a bit more. Even if all families in need cannot have their financial problems solved, some will be matched with friends who can remove their financial worries in this time of distress.