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The Zimin Foundation started helping Ukraine immediately after February 24, 2022, but initially most of the aid was in the form of receiving and responding to separate requests. By 2024, our Ukraine Help program took a clearer shape and amounted to 22.4% of the total ZF budget (as compared to 18.2% in 2023). The program includes support for education and science communication projects, some of them operating inside Ukraine, some in Europe. Most of these projects cannot be announced publicly. We are going to continue providing them with support in 2025.
Educational projects
The Zimin Foundation has partnered with several organisations that work in Ukraine.
One of the projects we support runs education camps for high schoolers from frontline territories. It offers children online programs and mentorship, supports their startups, and has launched an information campaign to make these children visible. This experience has attracted the attention of the Ukrainian government, which joined the effort to launch a program for children to receive educational assistance all year long.
We have also supported Safe Spaces: meeting spaces, media labs, etc. that teenagers get to furnish by themselves. Another joint project this year was a summer education camp for Ukrainian war orphans that took place in Durham University, UK, in July 2024.
The Biological Data Science Summer School is another initiative that the ZF supports in Ukraine. In 2024, the school held its second annual summer session in Uzhgorod. The two-week curriculum, taught to 58 Ukrainian students in English, focused on basic and advanced methods of bioinformatics and computational data analysis of modern data types in biology.
Mental health
The Zimin Foundation works with a project that operates in seven Ukrainian regions to stabilise the mental health of women and children who have survived bombings, violence, displacement, and death of love dones. We support therapeutic getaways to rehabilitate them.
Besides, the Zimin Foundation supports a program providing trauma counselling for children, teachers, and parents at theORT Ukraine School 141 in Kyiv. As the ongoing war takes a toll on the mental health of people in Ukraine, we look to focus on children and adults involved in the educational process, and plan to include all six ORT schools in Ukraine in our counselling program.
#Ukrainian_Library_Renaissance
The project ULR (Ukrainian Library Renaissance), was created to sponsor and assist Ukrainian libraries which were damaged as a result of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The project began in the end of 2023, since then 55 rural-libraries of many front-line oblasts have received (at times crucial) help in form of laptops and books. ULR has provided 55 laptops to operate an electronic catalogue and approximately 10,000 books from the list put together by the Association of Ukrainian Librarians. All these books are published in Ukraine. The ZF joined the projection 2023 when it started with 30 pilot libraries.
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“We would like to express sincere gratitude for the books we received from you. The book remains the main weapon of libraries and librarians. While the book lives, the nation lives, too. One can find like-minded folks in a book, it helps people unwind and not feel lonely...”
Respectfully yours, readers and librarians
of the Public Library of Snihurivka City Council
Portable power plants and more
Regular power outages caused by attacks on Ukraine's energy infrastructure jeopardise the lives of hospital patients and prevent schools from teaching children during the winter. The Zimin Foundation has allocated funds to purchase portable power plants for hospitals and schools in Ukraine.
The ZF also supports Veteranka Foundation,Trust and Help Funds, Help Ukraine Today, and other foundations that workinside Ukraine.
Refugees abroad
The #книжки_вслід(#books_follow) project helps Ukrainian refugees abroad. Outside Ukraine, we have helped provide books in the Ukrainian language for children’s groups and mobile libraries within refugee help centres in Tbilisi, Padua, Balen, Chisinau, Split, Prague, and Varna.
Displaced students and schoolchildren
The Zimin Foundation supports several educational projects that help war victims outside Ukraine.
One of them is Union School in Wroclaw (Poland), where over 220 refugee children of all school ages can study in the Ukrainian language, following a program certified by the Ukrainian education ministry. The school helps integrate the children into the local community and offers psychological counselling.
Another example is the ZF sponsoring scholarships for Ukrainian students to study at the Le Sallay Dialogue school.
In a joint effort targeting older students, the Nemtsov Foundation and the Zimin Foundation launched an emergency two-year scholarship for refugee students who are not eligible to apply for government-funded programs. In general we gave 30 scholarships for both Ukrainian and Russian students and scholars affected by the war in multiple universities: Bochum University (Germany), Hunter College (NY,USA), Charles University, Prague University, Prague Academy of Arts (all in Czech Republic).
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