Responding to Displacement from Ukraine: Reflections on Funding in an Emergency

Most foundations or donors active within the migration sphere in Europe rarely work on emergency support. EPIM is no different in this regard. The European Programme for Integration and Migration was founded in 2005 with a mandate for structural change. On the rare occasions that EPIM worked in another manner (the emergency at the Greece-Turkey border in 2020 and in support of the displacement that followed the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan), we provided localized, ad-hoc, small and short-term emergency support grants.

Our Ukraine response has thrown that approach overboard. The exceptional circumstances, so far, have necessitated a radical departure from our existing practices. First up was the challenge of fundraising over a short time.

Thanks to our extensive network built over 17 years of activity in Europe, EPIM was able to pool together a sizable sum of €4.3 million in a few weeks after the invasion began. Some of our constituent foundations, including Open Society Foundations, Robert Bosch Foundation, Fondation de France, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Adessium, Compagnia di San Paolo, Kahane Foundation and Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, came together to back the EPIM team’s call for an additional corpus, in addition to their sizable contributions to other civil society actors in Europe and Ukraine.

Our objective was simple and straightforward. We cast our net as wide we could, looking across Europe (not just the E.U.) to respond to any type of relevant need and to support anyone fleeing the war in Ukraine, regardless of their nationality, ethnicity, religion, age, gender, (dis)ability, sexual orientation and migration status.

So far, EPIM has disbursed a total of 11 grants to local, regional, national and transnational projects in Central and Eastern Europe, Greece, the U.K. and France, committing just under €1.8 million with several others in the pipeline. We’re supporting a wide range of activities, from housing and healthcare to education for third-country nationals, and have worked with actors of all shapes and sizes, from tiny collaboratives to large umbrella organizations.

Here’s what we’ve learned so far.

1. Money ≠ answers

Knowing what to do at the outset was difficult — we did not know where and what to prioritize with our funding. We also knew this was not a time to steer as a donor. Being flexible with our approach involved fully accepting uncertainty. As a collaborative fund, we had more leeway than many of our foundations, so we made full use of that.

There was no theory of change, no M&E plan and no long-term expectations. We accepted that we did not and could not know yet, and that organizations and communities operating on the ground knew best. And that is always how it should be.

2. Listen carefully and then fund

We’ve spent a lot of time “talking to the field,” not only with civil society organizations within and beyond the migration space, but with anyone else actively responding to the situation — E.U. institutions, international organizations, umbrella European networks, national authorities, local governments, the private sector and the media. These conversations have helped us understand who is doing what, where the current needs are and where future needs will be.

While the immediate urge in the philanthropic sector is to respond quickly to show presence and action, we found that in this case, waiting and watching was going to be more impactful. We wanted our decisions to be driven by evidence and committed our first grant in early May, more than two full months after the invasion.

3. Build and invest in alliances

Much of the world of philanthropy is still premised upon binary and dependent (steering) relationships between donors and grantees. If we ever needed a reality check to show us how outdated this approach is, Ukraine is it.

The scale and speed at which people fled the war and sought refuge in other countries required a concerted effort from different stakeholders. Governments, CSOs, donors and the private sector (groups often unaccustomed to working together) were obliged to join hands because working in isolation made no sense. EPIM therefore took on a convening role.

We quickly realized we were better off funding multi-stakeholder initiatives — efforts that were not dependent on one single donor or institution, and that could achieve more together in the long term. We funded one such alliance led by the From Streets to Homes Association in Budapest, which works alongside INGOs, the local municipality and the private sector to support people transitioning out of homelessness. In parallel, we served as a conduit between funders and other actors when we could not support or intervene.

4. Fund for the short term but build for the future

Sadly, no one knows how long this invasion will last. This shaped our thinking, and we designed our response to be flexible and nimble with the future in mind. As one of our partners put it, “This is a marathon, not a speed race.”

But funding for the long run does not have to mean long-term funding. It can also mean funding a prototype that has the ingredients and potential to scale. For example, we funded the Union for Exiled Students, a nonprofit created by and for exiled students in France, which works with public higher education institutions to help exiles resume their studies. The Union for Exiled Students hopes to scale its approach across France and partner with others in Europe — and we placed our bet there fully accepting the unknowns involved.

5. Don’t lose track of the big picture

Channeling and committing funds to refugees from Ukraine has inevitably meant that organizations working with other refugees across Europe are missing out. We’re also clearly seeing double standards and racism, not only in public discourse, but also in policies and interventions. As a result, we’ve tried to ensure that our funds in the Ukraine context also address the protection and inclusion needs of other displaced people, including non-Ukrainians displaced from Ukraine.

We funded the ERGO network in Central and Eastern Europe, which supports displaced Roma from Ukraine who have been either ignored or treated differently, both by state services and mainstream humanitarian organizations. Going forward, the philanthropic sector needs to consider how responding to displacement from Ukraine can help strengthen, improve, transform and scale Europe’s overall migration and asylum systems.

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As long as Ukraine remains under siege, and Europe grapples with a large, unpredictable and ever-mobile displacement of people from Ukraine, coupled with an escalating energy crisis, inflation and possibly even recession, the need for philanthropy to come together and think of innovative ways to respond has never been greater. EPIM’s founding objective was always to pursue a larger, further-reaching, and more impactful purpose than a single foundation could muster on its own. Today, that is more relevant than ever.

Milica Petrovic is Programme Director at the European Programme for Integration and Migration (EPIM).

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