Maryana from Kharkiv: How mobile teams of social workers help families overcome despair

Recently, Ukraine celebrated Social Worker’s Day. In recent years, social workers have been personally saving people from the heaviest burdens—disbelief, despair, and the urge to give up. This is the responsibility that Maryana from Kharkiv has taken upon herself, as she now works in our mobile team with families forced to leave their homes due to hostilities.

“The meaning of my life was to teach future social workers to be at their best and to perform their work to the highest standard. But the scale of the tragedy now is such that all hands are needed in practice,” says Maryana from Kharkiv. Since the invasion, this woman, who is raising three children, has not left her hometown. In addition to teaching at the Kharkiv Humanitarian-Pedagogical Academy, Maryana began directly helping people through humanitarian organizations, and this year, she became part of the “Responsible Citizens” team.

Our specialist says that she is most inspired by the resilience of people who, despite all the hardships, grow stronger. “I worked with a mother of three who has a disability. She was fleeing occupation, and the fate of her husband remains unknown; he is missing. She has three sons—very active and bright. The youngest, who are twins, are only four years old and needed interaction with their peers. The family is very united, and the benefits of the supportive environment and sessions with specialists are clearly visible in the children. The mother is a true example of a strong and courageous woman raising worthy people. Stories like these are truly inspiring.”

Each month, Maryana and the Kharkiv team conduct an average of 60 individual and group consultations, consistently supporting 25 families. Most of these are displaced families with children who left their homes in the Vovchansk and Kupiansk communities. She says that each case requires a purely individual approach based on the family’s needs. Sometimes people primarily need psychological support, while children benefit from specialized services like psychologists, speech therapists, and art therapists. Our mobile teams make use of all available options to involve relevant specialists as needed.

“I hardly feel fatigue from the workload! First of all, because helping people and seeing the results is inspiring. Plus, the specialists from the ‘Responsible Citizens’ team hold weekly supervision meetings focused on helping us decompress. This is a vital part of our work so that we can continue performing our duties effectively,” Maryana shares.

As Maryana notes, we need to start preparing for post-war recovery now because every war has an end, and we must address the social consequences of this war in practice right now.

“Just a few months before the full-scale invasion, I managed to obtain my Ph.D. in social work, specializing in training mobile social worker teams for rapid response. No one could have imagined that I would be putting all this theory into harsh practice. So now, I am certain that we need to be professionally prepared for the outcomes we will have to address after the war,” Maryana emphasizes.

The mobile teams work as part of the project “Strengthening Community Capacity to Provide Essential Protection Services and Resilience in Kharkiv, Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, and Zaporizhzhia Regions,” implemented by the NGO “Responsible Citizens” with the support of UNICEF and funding from USAID.