Youth4Ukraine

Volunteer teams supporting Ukrainian refugees in Poland and Romania

Youth4Ukraine is a volunteering-based solidarity project built around the idea that support becomes more meaningful when it is shared, collective, and rooted in care. Bringing together young Europeans in teams, the project creates spaces where solidarity is not limited to practical help, but shaped through relationships, participation, and everyday presence. Set in Poland and Romania, Youth4Ukraine responds to the realities of displacement by placing young volunteers alongside Ukrainian refugees in community-based activities that combine support, creativity, and human connection.

What gives the project its particular character is the lens through which this support is imagined. Youth4Ukraine is built with a strong gender perspective, paying close attention to the different ways in which war and displacement affect women, young women, and girls. In that sense, the project is not only about helping people adapt to a new environment, but also about creating more thoughtful and equitable forms of humanitarian response—ones that take dignity, safety, and participation seriously.

Who the project is for

At its heart, the project is centred on Ukrainian refugees in Poland and Romania, especially those whose daily lives have been shaped by uncertainty, movement, and the need to rebuild a sense of normality. Many of the people reached by the project are women, adolescents, and young people who face not only the consequences of displacement, but also the added pressures that come with gender-based inequality and exclusion.

At the same time, Youth4Ukraine is also built for the volunteers themselves. Across the life of the project, 100 young people take part in teams of ten, with a clear effort to include young people with fewer opportunities as part of the experience. What emerges is not simply a volunteering programme, but a shared setting in which young Europeans learn how to support others while also discovering new ways of working together across different backgrounds, realities, and social experiences.

What the project wants to achieve

Youth4Ukraine is built around a simple but ambitious intention: to strengthen solidarity while improving the gender approach in the assistance offered to Ukrainian refugees. Rather than treating volunteering as a generic form of help, the project gives it a clear direction. It invites young people to take part in support actions that are more aware of inequality, more attentive to the experiences of women and girls, and more capable of creating environments where people feel seen, heard, and included.

At the same time, the project also wants to make team volunteering itself more visible and meaningful. The work is not only about what volunteers do, but also about the kind of European citizenship that is expressed through these actions: one based on mutual aid, democratic values, and a willingness to respond to crisis with care rather than distance.

How it works

Team volunteering model

The project unfolds through teams of ten volunteers who spend around two months in one of two host locations: Poznań, in Poland, with Logos Polska, or Timișoara, in Romania, with FITT. These teams form the core of the experience. They arrive as a group, live the experience collectively, and gradually become part of the local rhythm of activities already developed around refugee support.

This collective dimension is essential to the spirit of the project. Youth4Ukraine is not built around isolated placements, but around teamwork: young people learning how to act together, support one another, and create a shared presence in spaces marked by vulnerability, transition, and adaptation. That shared experience gives the project both its strength and its emotional texture.

Typical flow of a volunteering team

Each volunteering cycle begins before arrival, with preparation, training, and accompaniment that help volunteers enter the experience with greater awareness and confidence. Once on the ground, the team settles into the local context, gets to know the hosting organisation, and gradually moves into the rhythm of activities, encounters, and community interaction. Throughout the process, support and mentoring remain close, helping volunteers navigate both the practical and human sides of the experience.

That gradual unfolding matters. It allows the team to become more than a temporary group of participants. Over time, it becomes a small community in itself—one that learns how to listen, facilitate, accompany, and respond with greater sensitivity to the realities around it.

Methods and Approach

The project is rooted in solidarity, non-formal learning, and collective responsibility. Volunteers take part in educational, artistic, and accompanying activities, but the deeper method is relational: creating spaces where people can meet, speak, reflect, and participate without being reduced to labels or categories.

A strong part of the approach is the integration of feminist principles and a gender perspective into humanitarian support. This means recognising that displacement is not experienced in the same way by everyone, and that women and girls often face specific risks, burdens, and exclusions in times of crisis. Within Youth4Ukraine, this awareness is not treated as a side topic, but as something that shapes the way support is imagined, organised, and lived.

Project timeline

Youth4Ukraine takes place over 24 months, allowing for repeated cycles of preparation, deployment, and follow-up across both host countries. This longer timeframe gives the project continuity and makes it possible for many different teams to contribute to the wider process.

Each volunteering mission lasts 61 days, including travel. That period is long enough for volunteers to move beyond first impressions and into something more rooted: a shared daily experience of support, exchange, and learning.

Main activities that the volunteers run

The activities within Youth4Ukraine reflect different ways of building connection and support. Some are educational, such as workshops on inclusion, gender, or digital literacy. Others open space for expression through participatory art, theatre, music, and other creative formats. In both Poland and Romania, activities are also designed around conversation, language practice, and public speaking, helping children and adults feel more confident in communication and social participation.

There is also a strong community-building dimension in the project. Local lunches, intercultural gatherings, culinary exchanges, and international picnics create informal moments where people can meet more naturally, share everyday experiences, and slowly build familiarity across cultures. These moments may seem simple, but they carry much of the project’s deeper meaning: they make room for warmth, encounter, and dignity in contexts often marked by rupture and uncertainty.

Training and preparation

Before the volunteering period begins, the project gives strong attention to preparation. Volunteers are introduced to the experience through training and specific learning pathways that help them understand the context they are entering, the importance of teamwork, and the responsibilities involved in working in humanitarian settings. The project also includes dedicated learning on feminist principles, reinforcing the values that shape the action as a whole.

This preparation gives the project a sense of depth. It makes space not only for practical readiness, but also for reflection: on safety, on culture, on gender, and on how solidarity can be practiced in a way that is thoughtful and respectful.

Practical support and benefits

Youth4Ukraine is also designed so that volunteers can fully inhabit the experience without the burden of managing everything alone. Travel, accommodation, insurance, and daily support are part of the structure, and volunteers are accompanied by mentors in both the sending and hosting organisations. This creates a framework in which personal support and practical stability go hand in hand.

That support matters because it gives volunteers the conditions to focus on what is most important: the people they meet, the activities they help shape, and the learning that unfolds through direct involvement. Over time, the experience becomes not just something they do, but something they grow through. At the end, that learning is recognised through Youthpass.

Future Opportunities

Although each placement is limited in time, Youth4Ukraine is designed as part of a wider process of learning, mobility, and civic engagement. The project gives young people a first or deeper experience of acting in solidarity across borders, while also strengthening their confidence, their social awareness, and their ability to work in complex human contexts.

In this sense, the project feels less like a short intervention and more like an entry point into a longer commitment: to participation, to justice, and to forms of European cooperation that are lived through action rather than only discussed in theory.

Youth4Ukraine is, above all, a project about showing up with intention. Through mixed volunteer teams, community-based activities, and a strong gender-aware approach to humanitarian support, it creates spaces where solidarity becomes something tangible: shared in conversation, expressed in creativity, and carried through everyday acts of care in Poland and Romania.

Project co-funded by the European Union.