How tech volunteers helped build out Ukrainian refugee centers

23 Mar How tech volunteers helped build out Ukrainian refugee centers

On March 4, as tens of thousands of Ukrainian citizens fled the country while Russian soldiers invaded, Vlad Mystetskyi got on a plane from Israel to Poland.

Mystetskyi, a team lead at the tech company Monday.com, volunteered to join the company’s emergency response team to help set up digital systems at camps along the Ukraine-Poland border. The company, which has a “low-code” or “no-code” platform for building software and apps to manage logistics, has deployed its employees in other crises. When COVID vaccines became available, for example, a team flew to the African country of Eswatini to help the ministry of health roll out vaccinations. They hadn’t worked with refugees before but thought that their tools could help overwhelmed nonprofits and government officials on the Ukraine border.

“A few hours [after making] the decision, we already were in the airport,” says Mystetskyi, who lives in Israel now but is originally from Ukraine. He flew with a colleague, originally from Russia, who also wanted to help. They didn’t know exactly what they’d do.

When they arrived in Korczowa—a Polish village where officials opened a welcome center for refugees in a former mall— they immediately identified logistical challenges and started to design a replicable model for processing arrivals, which volunteers could use to connect people with assistance more efficiently. In Poland alone, there are 27 refugee sites at the border, and the number of refugees continues to grow: More than 3.5 million people have fled across the border so far, and millions more are displaced within Ukraine and may soon leave.

“It was really complete chaos and catastrophe—it’s thousands of people who are coming from the border after they were standing in line for 30, 40, 50 hours,” he says. “They’re coming to a country where they don’t know the language, they don’t know where to go, they don’t know what they should do. Most of them are old people or women with kids. And they’re all on their own—the camp was organized by volunteers, and in general wasn’t coordinated or managed at all.”

The biggest challenge, he says, was connecting refugees with transportation. Most displaced people stay at the border only briefly. Volunteers with cars have lined up to offer rides to displaced people, in some cases driving for days from as far away as Spain. But there was no organized way to match drivers with refugees, some of whom might need to stay in Poland, or who might just want a ride to the train station to go meet family elsewhere. Police also warned that there was a risk that some refugees might become victims of human trafficking; but there wasn’t a way to vet drivers.

While the Monday.com team wasn’t able to coordinate with authorities at the first camp, it quickly traveled to another welcome center, in the city of Przemyśl, with the same challenges. The team used its platform to create a registration system both for displaced people and volunteers, gathering data that’s shared with the Polish government and owned by the organizations running each site. Refugees got wristbands with QR codes, and the team built an app that could scan the code and track who left in a particular car or on a bus.

“It really helps to understand, first of all, how many people went through the camp,” Mystetskyi says. “And how many of them left? What is the average time that they’re staying in the camp? What is the current amount of people who are in the camp? It helps with capacity planning. It also helps us to understand which drivers went in and how long they waited for passengers.”

The technology also helps track the languages that volunteers speak, so if a shift has few Ukrainian or Russian speakers, it’s possible to reach out for more volunteers. The team is also starting to work with organizations donating food and local municipalities to connect supplies with people in need and avoid food waste. (Others separately are trying to use technology to help in other ways, including Harvard students who built a website to help connect Ukrainian refugees with volunteers who can provide temporary housing.)

After the Monday.com team built their platform in Przemyśl, Polish authorities asked the company to help set up the system at another welcome center being built from scratch in the town of Chelm. The team arrived on a Thursday, and the camp opened a few days later. Another team simultaneously set up the system in Moldova, and another camp followed in Poland. A series of volunteers from the company have traveled to the region to help, each group training the next. Now, Mysteskyi says, the team wants to help scale up the solution to more sites.

Source: Fast Company