USAID/Ukraine’s “Forged Together” campaign aims to show how Ukrainian volunteers find creative ways to overcome challenges caused by Russia's war, forging a stronger, more resilient Ukraine. Follow the #Forged_Together campaign @USAIDUkraine on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
The NGO Garden City promotes efforts to create public spaces and green areas, develop and consolidate communities, and strengthen education and culture. The organization started its work supporting the creation of the square of the Heavenly Hundred in Kyiv. There, the team managed to unite the community around creating a flourishing park on the site of what had been a landfill.
Since then, Garden City has implemented many useful projects and actively helped Ukrainian cities recover from the devastation caused by Russia’s occupation. That includes planting community gardens in Bucha, Irpin, and Borodyanka.
We spoke to Yevheniia Kuleba, founder of Garden City, to learn more about her organization and its work. She started by discussing how the full-scale war has affected Ukrainians:
“Russia's military aggression has destroyed the normal life of Ukrainians, for whom working on the land is a kind of genetic code. But last spring, we saw that in the towns liberated from the occupation, one of the first ways people returned to life was by planting gardens. They showed that life triumphs over death, that people find solace in interacting with plants. Attraction with the earth gives us the strength to live no matter what. You just need to plant a garden.”
The Garden City team came up with the following: millions of Ukrainians have summer cottages and gardens, and even more have balconies and adjoining plots, which today can become a form of therapy to help Ukrainians return to normal life. The small community gardens that Garden City plants together with local citizens are an example of how communities can renew themselves after occupation.
“For Ukraine, such gardens will become a symbol of faith in the future, development, continuation of history and memory of those who defended Ukrainian land from the occupiers and worked for our victory,” Yevheniia adds.
USAID has supported Garden City to implement community projects since before Russia’s full-scale invasion. With USAID support, Garden City created Mulberry Park in Slovyansk, and in several cities in eastern Ukraine, including Kostyantynivka, Mariupol, Dobropillya, and Pokrovsk, USAID helped Garden City reconstruct public spaces to better the needs of citizens.
Yevheniia says that the Garden City team has big plans for the future: they want to create a platform to raise public awareness of war crimes against the environment that Russia’s forces have committed on the territory of Ukraine. They also aim to overcome the consequences of these crimes and find ways to restore Ukraine’s environment, raise citizens’ awareness of environmental issues, and advance climate change adaptation.
Yevheniia believes that all this will be possible in the near future:
“Ukraine should be a prosperous country of happy people. We all realize that there is a lot of work to be done in the post-war reconstruction. But we will definitely do it all together. We want to be able to create human-centered spaces. We want people on the ground to be able to participate in decision-making and create their own future.”
