HOMELESSNESS in Ukraine was highlighted when the Roman Catholic Depaul group of charities marked 35 years in existence last week.
The charities’ Ukrainian branch reported, on 24 September, on the situation of the country’s homeless people. Homelessness is exacerbated by the continued war with Russia, its report concludes: people internally displaced by the fighting make up almost one quarter of those sleeping rough or in emergency shelters.
The charity describes its report as probably the most comprehensive report on homelessness in Ukraine to this point. It draws on interviews with 234 individuals who were homeless of liable to being so.
Homelessness-prevention services in Ukraine are “alarmingly limited”, the report says, and “the extent and composition of services nationwide” are usually not enough to fulfill current needs.
Depaul’s research suggests that rough-sleepers in Ukraine are “functionally excluded from just about all types of assistance they need”; it recommends collaboration between charitable organisations and the federal government to bring about systemic change.
On Thursday of last week, Depaul Ukraine’s chief executive, Anka Skoryk, said: “The full-scale invasion has modified every little thing in our country. We noticed that increasingly people had lost their homes, and a number of people were displaced because they tried to flee military actions. Thanks to the support we received, because of all our donors, we scaled up our operations and we began the humanitarian response.”
To address the issue, charities and government agencies needed to co-operate more closely, said Ms Skoryk, who was speaking on the sidelines of an event within the House of Lords held to mark Depaul’s thirty fifth birthday.
The group’s president, Mark McGreevy, paid tribute to the breadth of the work done by seven independent charities operating inside the group, based within the UK, Ireland, France, Croatia, Slovakia, the United States, and Ukraine.
It was established out of three organisations, including the Daughters of Charity, a spiritual order founded by St Vincent de Paul in 1633.
Baroness Casey, a crossbench peer whose profession has been in homelessness prevention, is an envoy for Depaul International, and said: “What we’d like as human beings is a protected place that we are able to call home.” She emphasised the importance of international motion.
The United Nations adopted a proper definition of homelessness in 2021, and Lady Casey said that this is able to not have happened without the work of nations in the worldwide South.
Now, the ambition was to include homelessness prevention within the UN’s updated Sustainable Development Goals, she said, as, in her experience, setting measurable targets was the important thing to creating progress. “If you don’t count it, it isn’t seen, and if it isn’t seen, it doesn’t turn out to be a goal,” she said.
