Over the last eight weeks we all have seen and witnessed an increasing amount of attacks on local civilian infrastructure. Those attacks were primarily focused on the power-grid operators across major Ukrainian cities heavily impacting the availability of electricity, mobile networks and central heating. 

With winter coming and temperatures dropping below zero now, we refocused our efforts to setting up central locations for the local community in case of longer power outages. We installed working generators and access points to satellite communication. This enables people to have a heated place to go during power outages, being able to charge electronics devices and if possible follow daily work routines. We would like to extend a big thank you to Olga Ermakova and Dmitry Ermakov who setup and managed all operations onsite.

Last not least, we also continue to expand activities with the WeAreBrain Foundation which we setup back in June. All donations processed through the Steunactie website are directly going to the Foundation and all funds are 100% dedicated to providing ongoing and personalised support on-site.

Dear friends and support partners, 
It's been a bit quiet with updates but nonetheless lots of things have been happening. While continuing our support efforts with the same energy and dedication, we got together with some of our partners to establish the WeAreBrain Foundation which is now officially established, registered and approved by the relevant authorities and institutions. For us this was an important step to further formalise and expand our support activities. The WeAreBrain Foundation will be run by Frederique van Gulik, Michel Pilet and Mario Grunitz.

We will continue to run this fundraiser until the end of July before moving all activities structurally over to the WeAreBrain Foundation.

We would like to thank you all again for the trust and ongoing support. Please do not hesitate to reach out with any questions you might have or if you are interested to hear more about the work we will do with the WeAreBrain Foundation. 

Thank you all so much for the continuous support. Today it's a very short but detailed update sharing with you how your donations are helping:

Maybe not entirely surprising, but 45% is going into temporary housing and accommodation both in Ukraine as well as the Netherlands. 

35% is going into all the logistics and transportation.

20% into psychological support, individual medical requirements, and necessary short term support with insurances.

We are proud that 0% of the donations is wasted on any admin or overhead activities. Thanks to you we can 100% focus on providing #personalised #direct and #ongoing support.

Thank you again and please don't hesitate to reach out to us (Elvire and Mario) with any questions you might have.

Over the first month of the war in Ukraine, your generous donations made it possible for us to to provide direct, ongoing and personalised support to a total of 42 Ukrainian families, a total of almost 100 individuals.

Last week, we have been able to pass our €15.000 donation target as well. A big thank you to our partners from TIP Trailer Services who made that happen with a donation of €2.000. This also meant we were able to further increase our direct donation target from €15.000 to €20.000. 

In addition, we would like to share with you that our business partners and friends from Anywhere365 have doubled our initial funding goal of €15.000 with a direct €15.000 donation of their own. We would like to say a big thank you for this incredible gesture to Hans Kramers, Enrico Karsten and the entire Anywhere365 team in Rotterdam.

Here we go again and today with a brief personal update. 

One of our team members who has been living in the Netherlands for many many years, will finally be able to reunite with some of her elderly family members. She's currently on her way to the Polish border to get them safely to the Netherlands. 

Thank you again for your ongoing support and we'll provide additional updates later in the week.

Apologies for a somewhat delayed update this week. It's been a hectic few days but we're glad to share that we were able to welcome more families already in the Netherlands while we assisted 3 other families to safely cross the border, currently making their way. 

Thanks to your generous support, we so far were able to arrange accommodations for everyone. Additionally, we now have an ongoing daily psychological support line with a native speaker who can assist and check on people individually.

One of our team members in Amsterdam is full time available to arrange any logistics, providing administrative support and generally guiding people with their first orientation in the Netherlands. All of this is possible thanks your help and support which we are eternally grateful for.

Locally in Ukraine, temporary housing for more than 20 families has been arranged in the relatively safe Western part of the country. Generally speaking morale is high. But we just need to be realistic that supplies and provisioning of basic services in the country are becoming increasingly difficult with shortages in shops and supermarket a main concern.

But we continue our mission and will provide more updates over the weekend.

Thank you again ❤️

We're close to reaching our initial target. A big thank you for this! We'd love to raise the bar and go further. We appreciate all of your support and again please know that all of your help is direct, personal and goes directly to the people most in need.

Thank you all for the support so far! You're incredible.
During the night we had a van leaving to Poland packed with basic supplies. On the way back we'll take 3 women and 4 children to safety in Netherlands where accommodation is already arranged.