A DECLARATION OF
CRISIS & RENEWAL

"What can you say when over there, everyone everywhere is shouting, sirens screaming, smoke crackling high up, evaculuggage wheels squeaking. The war gave everyone a role — what’s yours?" exclaims Ukrainian poet Iryna Shuvalova.

There is a calling in this for everyone. This is that story.

Citizens, community leaders, and entrepreneurs from across Ukraine are taking tenacious leaps. Most are women. With a touch of daring, they are both miraculously sustaining and valiantly preparing to rebuild a country.

From Mariupol, Kharkiv and Kyiv to Krakow, Bucharest and Budapest - Ukrainian women are stretching, contorting, pivoting their personal and professional lives.

With an unassuming yet magnified sense of service they are transforming their production lines, stretching their caring responsibilities, galvanising latent resources and inventing wholly new business and operating models. They are both the new humanitarians and the lifeblood of an economy under attack.

Every business is now a social business. Fashion labels make sleeping bags for the displaced. Management consultants run training in first aid and crisis management. IT companies launch intensive tech courses for those forced to leave their former profession. Architects focus on green homes that can be built in 30 days. And the bakery famous for its cupcakes shifts production to long-life rye bread - crammed daily into the boots of cars heading for the frontlines.

Such transformation and perseverance is as humbling as it is remarkable. But this capacity to overcome adversity shouldn't avert our care for what's difficult.

Here are ten acute difficulties.

1. Staying safe
13 million people are estimated to be stranded in affected areas, unable to leave due to heightened security risks or the destruction of bridges and roads. In an effort to stay safe, over half the country's businesses have already or are preparing to relocate.

2. Radical market disruption
Small and medium-sized Ukrainian businesses have already lost $80 billion in revenue and assets. The dramatic loss of income has seen purchasing power and markets plummet. Clauses in foreign contracts stating that business can't be done with a country at war have left agreements terminated overnight - a cruel irony when it is many of the same companies pledging their public concern and support.

3. Humans on the move
7 million people have been internally displaced. 8 million have left the country. Most digitally savvy enterprises have ridden the wave of dislocation, but for a country where 99.9% of the working population is involved in small and medium scale enterprise, often linked to agriculture and micro manufacturing the dislocation can be catastrophic.

4. No investment
Banks aren't lending. Friends and family save everything they can. There is a sprinkling of foreign grant programmes but only for those skilled at navigating the forms. Access to conventional sources of capital has dried up fast. Generous funds have been raised abroad - but only 0.003% of the cash for Ukraine went directly to organisations registered in the country.

5. Wartime logistics
A train network still operating with such stoical resilience is a testament to the nation's ingenuity and resolve. But managing people, resources, cash flow and supply chains has taken on immense levels of complexity.

6. Countering despair
Anxiety, trauma, and burnout are taking their toll. And there is little in the way of adequate psychological support for individuals let alone their families or teams.

7. Family responsibilities
Childcare, elderly relatives, the disabled and the mentally unwell. The pressures escalate as men leave for the frontline, as internal displacement grows and as the realities of becoming a refugee hit home for so many.

8. Extreme uncertainty
Uncertain timing of disruptions, of what and when is safe and when an economy might flourish again - the not knowing makes planning and forecasting increasingly arduous and ineffective.

9. Reinventing purpose and identity
The reinvention of family life, businesses and oneself - is as exhausting as it is vital. There is an intimacy, depth, and complexity to these personal and professional transitions that is beyond even the most thoughtful foreign mentor or support programme.

10. No mandate for the future
Foreign summits are launching huge international efforts to rebuild Ukraine. The Lugano Summit alone pronounced 15 priority areas, 162 priority themes, 51 working groups, and 750 billion in targeted investment. But no open invitation to the very people with the imagination and resolve this most deserves.

The escalated war has seen a huge increase in humanitarian actors. But too often they operate in isolation without sufficient insight into other initiatives and local knowledge. In an effort to dramatically increase collaboration, and with a belief that more can be achieved together than alone - work has begun on an open-source map. This covers the diverse ecosystem of projects and organisations from humanitarian actors, to social enterprises, to female-led businesses seeking to play their part in responding to the escalated war. Please say hello if you would like to add to the map.

From as far afield as Odesa, Lviv, Kyiv, Kherson, Ivano-Franivsk, Warsaw, Krakow, Bucharest, Tallinn and Berlin - Ukrainian female entrepreneurs came together in Warsaw and online in an act of togetherness.

The solidarity alongside the harrowing if shared lived experience was palpable. So too was the resolve to shape and participate in a more effective humanitarian response.

Over 100 women participated in interviews and discussion. Their acumen and magnanimity escape singular definition.

There was an ethos, a set of sensibilities and behaviours - practised more than said - that represents nothing short of a social leap in humanitarian response.