Pocket Project e.V.

This reflection was written by Daria Yemets, Project Manager for Ukraine at The Pocket Project. It tells the story of how personal experience of war became a commitment to creating spaces where young Ukrainians can find connection, resilience, and hope together.
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I was raised to believe a simple contract: be good, and life will follow. For years, I held that belief like a compass. But compasses fail when the ground beneath you shifts.
In 2014, when Russian tanks rolled into Crimea and then into eastern Ukraine, I felt something crack in the very logic I had been given to navigate life. I was a good daughter, a good citizen, a good student – and the worst was happening anyway. By 2022, that crack had become a chasm. I stood in Kharkiv, eight kilometers from Russian tanks, watching the forest near my childhood home—my first safe space, my friend—become a shock absorber for the missiles meant for my home.
And I understood that this was not my crisis alone. This was something deeper, a weight that transcended my own life and reached backward and forward through time. When I was writing my master's thesis on collective trauma healing, I was alone in that work. Ukrainian sources barely existed. I reached out, searching, and found Thomas Hübl's Collective Trauma Summit online. That summit became my classroom and my permission slip to think what no one around me seemed ready to think yet.
Then, in February 2022, as the full-scale invasion began, I received a newsletter from The Pocket Project. They were launching an Ukraine Support initiative. I read it and felt something shift inside. This was coherent with everything I had sensed in my body and spirit.
What I understand now, four years later: Collective trauma is not an abstract concept. It lives in forests that absorb bombs. It lives in the broken contract between goodness and safety. It lives in the slow erosion of hope that began in 2014 and became acute in 2022. It lives in the bodies of young Ukrainians who are building resilience not because they want to, but because they must.
But here is what I have also learned: resilience is not something that happens to you. It is something we build together—day after day, under sirens, after sleepless nights, in relationship with one another. The facilitators we have trained are not heroes. They are ordinary Ukrainians who chose to transform their own rupture into a resource for others. They chose to become conduits—not of charity, but of collective agency. Of the radical insistence that even in war, healing, creativity, and community remain possible.
When a young person joins a Resilience Circle in Ukraine or in the diaspora, they are not receiving therapy. They are entering a space where people sense together, grieve together, remember together—and through that witnessing, begin to weave something new.
Your support makes this possible. Every donation funds a scholarship for a young Ukrainian to train as a Resilience Circle facilitator—someone who will go on to support many more young people in their own community. It helps sustain a growing network of young Ukrainians creating spaces of resilience, connection, and mutual support across Ukraine and the diaspora.

If this story resonates with you, this Sunday offers a special opportunity to help these circles continue to grow.
On Sunday, June 28, The Pocket Project is participating in the Betterplace Donation Marathon. Every donation made to our Ukraine project on that day helps increase our share of a €225,000 bonus funding pool, allowing your contribution to reach even further and support more young Ukrainians.

You cannot stop the war. But you can help us keep the circles open. You can help ensure that when a young person in Kharkiv, Lviv, or Berlin looks for a safe space to process what they are carrying, they find not emptiness, but a circle of people who understand—because they carry it too. Thank you for helping us keep the circles open.