To #ShiftThePower community and international auditory,
We are the National Network of Local Philanthropy Development, a Ukrainian community foundation support organization working on shifting the power in Ukraine through working with international funders to advocate the localization process. We had a chance to participate in.
For Ukraine, ShiftThePower is about surviving. At present, we are dependent on international aid - humanitarian, economic, and military. Shift The Power for us is to have global solidarity, considering our context and respect for our fight for independence and democratic values. For sure, it's also about local resources. And in the past two years, Ukrainians have collected 2,3 billion US dollars only with cash just for supporting our military. But we are in a media world where you can pay to create any type of news. What Russia does is pay a lot to some social opinion leaders who are not local communities but have the recognition and power to influence bigger donors, states, and people's mindsets in other countries. So, shifting the power is about amplifying and investing in the voice of locals.
During one of the sessions, All delegates wrote a slogan about a strategy for safe communities. One of the slogans was dedicated to was related to the topic of inclusive listening. We can relate to that as if peacebuilding is happening, communities should be heard. Peace shouldn’t be forced. The community should own its peace.
During another session, there was a discussion about decolonization. And everyone has a different context. We want to share the Ukrainian context a bit. Since 2014, we had about 7% of occupied territories by Russia. In 2014, Russia and Ukraine signed the Minsk Agreement, which withheld the active phase of the war. In 2022, Russia started a full-scale invasion to Ukraine. Right now, 18% of our territory is occupied. About 20 towns and a countless number of villages have been totally destroyed. Occupiers are killing civilians just because they are Ukrainian. Occupiers rape women and kidnap children. Occupiers don’t allow to give aid to people in occupied territories. INGOs don’t have access to those territories and don’t support those activists who manage to help there. Occupiers force the indigenous population to leave their homes, especially Crimea Tatars.
You may think that Ukraine’s colonization by Russia is a matter of just the past few years. In fact, it's been happening for centuries since Russia absorbed much of Ukraine in the late 17th century. And since 1922, when Russia re-conquered a briefly independent Ukraine and forced it into the USSR, Russia murdered our intelligentsia, culture, and religion – and people, such as during the genocide famine in 1932-33. Then, in 1991, we formally received our independence. But was it real? Partly. Our national assets were stolen or destroyed; we were forced to give up nuclear weapons with ghostly protection offered by the Budapest Memorandum. Ukrainians were still economically dependent on Russia. But as soon as ex-Soviet countries began developing, Russia went far from what the Soviet Union was in the last decades of its existence. Russians decided to inherit the soviet dictatorship and restore the empire. It is now an autocratic country that tries to convince the world that Ukraine doesn't exist. So, for us, colonialism is not only a process of creating economic dependence, extraction, and exploitation. It is also conquest and subjugation, which Ukraine is now experiencing. Colonialism is also about the power to convince the world that bad things are good and that evil is just.
During the #ShiftThePower summit, all participants learned that we face the same issues in our different contexts, such as powerless local communities, forcing for neutrality, politically correct wording, and forcing half-hearted peace. We see the same patterns, and we can learn a lot from each other. There are more than 30 wars and conflicts in the world. We should not forget about any. For us Ukrainians, this is our current, very acute liberation struggle.
But our request to everyone, let's start with inclusive listening to each other. We should be in solidarity with each other and be sure that we are fighting for the same purpose - a better life for our local communities. We should share, but not compare, our grief and losses. As we go through similar experiences, we can build closer connections with empathy, which will accumulate the strength in our community to really #ShiftThePower.