A 100 refugees to the UEFA Qualifiers 2024

The idea started as a simple effort to bring more "newcomers" from Ukraine to the table and adopt roles as community leaders. Since last year, I have been actively helping the local council with their efforts to reintegrate Ukrainian refugees successfully. This eventually landed me the position as the representative of the Ukrainians living in the city, roughly 2500 Ukrainians.

As time has passed, the team and I have noticed a dwindling amount of Ukrainian volunteers, and even more so, dwindling amount of initiatives from the Ukrainians themselves.

Why?

Since the last 2 months, I have been closely working on this issue with a non-profit that specialises in bringing locals and newcomers together.

Is it loss of motivation? Is it busy schedules? Is it loss of trust? Unrealized results? Absence of incentives?

There is no clear answer to these questions. However, we started off with the basic idea of bringing together the Ukrainians who would like to be active in communtiy building activities and, in some way, incentivize them for their efforts apart from the reward of doing something for the community.

We finalized on creating a small presentation, a welcoming session doubled as a brainstorming session that would end up in Johan Cruijff Arena where we'd watch the Qualifier's match between France and Netherlands together.

What started as a local idea spread into a national idea bringing Ukrainians from other cities, as well as newcomers from other countries. A massive operation, thanks to the reach of the nonprofit.

This is the only reason I still collaborate with NGOs and nonprofits; their connections and reach. It makes things much easier and the potential to scale is higher.

From our city, roughly a hundred newcomers participated, granted not everyone joined the meeting. Among them were roughly 20 Ukrainians under my wing.

This is a great way to stimulate conversations, brainstorm, come up with ideas, and continue community-led initiatives for the Ukrainian community itself.

In total 3 parties were involved in the organisational side of things; 2 nonprofits and the stadium itself. I'm still waiting on survey results to see if this was a good strategy.

The stadium itself was crowded. But with volunteers from the nonprofit it went as smooth as possible. After distributing free tokens for drinks among the Ukrainians, it was time for me to enjoy the match. Unfortunately, due to the crowds, it was difficult to meet the attendees from the other cities. But we will be working on that for future projects.
Every Ukrainian got two tokens, which could be exchanged for two free drinks.

In a packed stadium filled with home supporters, it was a disappointing end to the match for Netherlands supporters. With 3 major injuries on the bench, a lack of proper formation, and a visible lackluster performance from the Orange, the world cup runner-up, France, took a comfortable win.

I wanted to keep the Ukrainians together, so had to sit separately from the group, but I had fun being a total football-head with the group of Dutchies I was sitting with.

France is in a pretty good shape. Impressive even. As much as I want to applaud them for playing beautiful football and using their biggest strength, Mbappe, to the fullest, I am also sad that Netherlands had to lose.

After the match, and a few photos later, we headed back to our city feeling motivated.

My goal is to have at least 1% of the Ukrainian population in the city to step up to the table and take a permanent role of leading the community, bringing feedback from the Ukrainians, and brainstorming for the community.

At the end of the day I believe the community alone is the best at shaping a successful communtiy, and no one understands us better than ourselves.

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