‘Social entrepreneurship is booming in Ukraine’ – Anna Gulevska-Chernysh of SILab
After nearly three years of war, Ukrainians are continuing to adapt to their ‘new normal life’. Not only are they suffering the trauma of losses and injuries among their people, but they also face nights broken by missile attacks and constant power outages. Good business is a vital part of the response, says the head of the country’s social enterprise support body.
While world leaders continue their struggle to find a resolution to the war in Ukraine, the country’s citizens have had to adapt their day-to-day life to a conflict that has now lasted for nearly three years. Anna Gulevska-Chernysh is co-founder and chair of SILab, Ukraine’s social enterprise support body, and we first spoke to her in March 2022, just six days after Russia invaded.
At that time, Gulevska-Chernysh was co-ordinating a humanitarian effort to support internally displaced people – 160,000 Ukrainians had already fled their homes to safer places within the country. Alongside that, social entrepreneurs were swiftly pivoting their activities to focus on the urgent humanitarian and defence needs: for example, an upcycling enterprise began to make camouflage nets and a homeless support centre opened its doors to refugees.
Speaking at a conference a few months later, Gulevska-Chernysh’s defiant optimism struck listeners as she highlighted how the war had prompted innovators to come up with new business ideas that met the new needs of a country at war.
SILab also co-founded impact investor the Ukrainian Social Venture Fund (legally registered in December 2022), and Gulevska-Chernysh sits on its board. SILab and the Ukrainian Social Venture Fund have partnered for several years with social enterprise network Impact Europe. As a result, Gulevska-Chernysh was at November’s Impact Week event, which was held in Malmö, Sweden. As delegates were busy networking, we managed to catch up with her for 15 minutes to see how she and her colleagues in the social enterprise movement were continuing to cope with their homeland under siege. This is what she told us.
People in the country, unfortunately, have adapted to a new normal life, with all the drones, with all the missiles, alarms every night. And people are developing and trying to find themselves in these new conditions. Social entrepreneurship is booming, because that is the response of the people to the situation.
I want people to understand that today in Kyiv we will only have three hours of electricity within 24 hours, and all businesses have to work within these restrictions. We have to constantly support people to keep their businesses alive. You always have to be thinking five steps ahead to have a plan B and a plan C. And, unfortunately, we are losing our own people.
More and more classical businesses come to us and say, can you help us to develop an impact strategy? Since last year, we have been running the Impact Business Accelerator to support companies to do this. For example, a company that produces clothes has created courses for internally displaced women to learn design and fashion. Some of these women stay with them, and some create their own micro-businesses. And for many businesses, an issue is veteran integration: people who come back from the army who have been injured and cannot continue their army service need to be reintegrated into the working environment. So many companies are thinking about how to integrate veterans, to prepare the working space, or to hire a psychologist to give support.
We have to constantly support people to keep their businesses alive. You always have to be thinking five steps ahead
Two years ago we launched a programme for internally displaced women, for women who lost their homes, who lost their husbands on the frontline and who want to start micro-businesses. It is based on our experience of working with social enterprises. We help them develop a business model and a marketing programme, and it’s very successful. Already more than 500 women have been through our courses and about 200 have launched their businesses. They’re very simple businesses, like manicures and other cosmetic procedures which are very popular in Ukraine. Some do food production, others make jewellery and bags, and they’re starting to sell online in European markets, like on Etsy.
We have thousands of injured people, so last year we started supporting a new group of impact businesses – community rehabilitation centres. There are good rehabilitation centres in the big cities and they can stay there for maybe one month, but then they return to their communities: rehabilitation is a long process and there is nothing there. We help communities create rehabilitation centres for the military but also for civilians – adults and children – providing physical, psychological and social integrated care. We conducted an incubation programme and our focus is to help them build a stable business model so they don’t have to depend on the state budget and they can attract other resources. They operate as social enterprises. We teach them how it is possible to run a business in our reality. In January we will start the second programme.
We are tired, but you adjust somehow. And when you go outside the country, to conferences like this, you can sleep without the alarms which go off almost every night. Last week, we launched a new project with our Swedish partners, Reach for Change, for faster development of the ecosystem for social entrepreneurship in Ukraine. We brought all our team to Sweden for planning, training and a couple of days just resting, just sleeping (pictured below). They were so happy that they could sleep for five nights.
Last year with the Ukrainian Social Venture Fund we introduced blended finance. Before that we were only working with grants, or smart grants. Now we have finance that is part grant, but there is also a returnable part. We are training our social enterprises and rehabilitation centres to become more business oriented, to build their financial stability and to be able to attract resources for further development. We’re already building capacity with this fund.
All the internal Ukrainian resources go to the army, to the defence of our country. So all investment needs to be from foreign sources. We are very busy because all three areas – social enterprise, supporting mainstream businesses and rehabilitation centres – require a lot of time and resources. We have a lot of work to do.
Header image: Participants in the first incubation programme for rehabilitation centres 'Demo Day' run by SILab and the Ukrainian Social Venture Fund earlier this year. After 24 centres took part in 10 weeks of training, five received grants to support their work.
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