Kharkiv native Tania Kamienieva founded the Shields Foundation in 2022, when she was just 25. The foundation has been fundraising for the Ukrainian army since the first days of the full-scale invasion.

Kamienieva tells The Village Ukraine about NGO work in Ukraine, what support she expects from the state, and how she envisions her foundation’s future.

My road to charity work

I have worked in charity full-time since 2019. My partner and I owned a restaurant in Kharkiv that employed people with mental health issues: autism, Down syndrome, and other complex conditions. Later, I worked as a charity manager at the Kurazh Bazar market. Then I took a brief pause from employment, and then the full-scale war started. In times of crisis, I do what I do best: charity work. That’s how Shields started.

Looking further back, as a kid, I loved public service announcements. I’ve always been interested in public work. I read Nancy McWilliams’s Psychoanalytic Diagnosis, which describes different personality types, and found my archetype. A lot of people who are professionally involved in charity have a lot of guilt. I know this, and I know that my experience has led me here, but I find it really rewarding right now. I like reading about stuff like this.

The first fundraiser at the start of the full-scale invasion

The first fundraiser we organized was to buy armor. On February 24, I left for Lviv Oblast in western Ukraine with my family and my best friend and her family. Her family had been helping the military since 2014, which is how we got the contacts of people that we knew needed help. Everyone was looking for armor then.

I started my first fundraiser by myself, Tania Kamienieva. I raised the money very quickly thanks to a large crypto currency donation. I posted on Facebook that I was looking for armor. I got a message from the owner of Ukrainska Bronia (Ukrainian Armor). I didn’t know about the firm then. He said they were importing quality armor, that they’d been doing it for a long time. I sent him a huge amount of money, $100,000 – I just sent all that money to someone I didn’t know at all. This guy has since cofounded the Kolo Foundation. At the time, he was just a stranger I met on social media. He really did get good-quality armor for us and we sent it to the front.

How her early fundraising efforts turned into a foundation

The push for me to launch the foundation came from a large donation I received. The money came from Rostyk, the boyfriend of a girl I went to the kindergarten with. Rostyk sent me hundreds of thousands of dollars. That money must’ve been what he’s saved over years and years. He told me he sent me the money because he knew I’d put it to good use. I’ll be grateful to him my whole life, because he made me realize that I have to create a foundation and keep going. Shields Ukraine began its operations on March 8, 2022.

The foundation currently employs 10 people: me; my younger sister, who is responsible for finding and purchasing whatever we might need from all over the world; my partner Artem, who communicates with the soldiers and researches their needs; Denys and Kyrylo, who have worked at a Kharkiv warehouse since the start of the full-scale invasion and continue to work there. At first they delivered food to soldiers’ positions and helped load and unload aid packages. They’ve been caught in shelling. Sandra is our communications manager, and Katia and Olenka work in fundraising. We also have volunteers who help us whenever they’re free and contract workers we pay to help us with copy writing and producing videos.

I remember telling a much bigger foundation about our work – they were impressed with how efficiently we were managing our funds and our team. I think that as a manager I must’ve created these conditions for us. I’ve never worked for a corporation, with an unlimited budget, so I try to manage the resources I have as efficiently as possible.

All of us get a salary now, but that money doesn’t come from donations. My partner Artem’s firm is paying us, and they also cover our marketing costs. Even though we worked as volunteers for a year before then, nothing has changed for our team. We just keep going.

It matters to me that my team gets paid because we are all doing a lot; if we were doing the same amount of work in our free time alone, we would never be this effective.

We’ve raised around 200 million hryvnias so far (nearly $5 million). Now that we hired two fundraising managers, we’re hoping to be able to approach fundraising more systematically. So far we ran on my chaotic ideas alone.

Motivating a team

My partner Artem is always setting an example of smart charity work for me. In our team, he is the philanthropist – he’s the only one who’s not paid a salary. He gives a lot of his time to the foundation and he’s the one paying all of our salaries. This gives us a chance to keep working and to dedicate our time to the cause, as well as to grow and develop.

Even before the full-scale invasion I was trying to raise awareness that charity, the third sector of the economy, can be full-time work. I really like volunteering as an idea, but it’s totally different. Volunteering is something you can take or leave, for example if you’re tired. Systemic charity work, however, is a full-time job. People give it their time and energy. A great charity manager has to be remunerated like a great manager in the for-profit sector, because they are doing the same job – offering a service, to put it crudely. In order for this to work in the long term, we have to support people working in charity.

I think that a healthy charity sector is one of the key pillars of states the world over.

It’s not an indication that the government has failed at something. The charity sector is an intermediary between the people and the state. We create tools that people can use. If they work well, our goal becomes to integrate them into state institutions. We’re friends [charities and the state], not enemies. We’re all in this together.

Aspirations

I really like the Tabletochki Foundation [a Ukrainian non-profit helping children with oncological and hematological diseases – ed.] and the way they approach things. They’re my benchmark, because they don’t just treat kids with cancer, but they also train Ukrainian doctors and develop the entire ecosystem around pediatric oncology.

There are four key development stages that can be applied on the level of an individual, a family, a system, an organization, or a church, for example. The first step is codependence, when you can’t do anything on your own. The second is counter-dependence, when you try to do everything differently from others. Next is independence, when you feel self-sufficient and want to grow and move forward. The last step is interdependence and mutual exchange. Working in an NGO necessarily situates you in an environment that’s in this fourth and last development stage. These people are ready to give.

In terms of what we should expect from the public – it’s more recognition that charity is part of our everyday lives. I would really like for us as a society to arrive at the point where this is something everyone knows and understands. Where it’s part of our lives. The war is helping us with this, because it’s churned up a major growth spurt for the charity sector and for public consciousness.

Changes in the charity sector and culture since 2022

At first we raised money mostly for personal protective equipment, because the foundation was born out of our desire to help people we knew. But the more it grew, the more responsibility we felt. We realized that the government was supplying the military with personal protective equipment and started to fundraise for bigger things.

First we fundraised a lot for body armor and communication devices. Then vehicles. Then drones. Now we’re fundraising for electronic warfare systems.

Of course we still receive requests for vehicles, and we continue to procure things like modules for the ShaBlia machine gun. But the larger trend is that there is now greater demand for electronic warfare systems, even though that [trend] changes all the time.

There are a number of brigades we work with on a regular basis. We stay in touch with them, and they tell us what they need. This helps us understand what’s happening, what their needs are, and how to proceed with fundraising. When everyone’s asking us for electronic warfare systems, we know that we’ll have to organize a big electronic warfare systems fundraiser.

We try to never say no to some brigades. We’re in touch with their commanders and understand the critical nature of what they ask for. We always have a budget for urgent requests for vehicles, drones, or complex engineering solutions like tank- and APC-based electronic warfare systems.

Overall, we get requests from around 30 brigades, but we’re always open to more.

Where money comes from

We usually have one main fundraiser through which we raise money – around 7-10 million hryvnias (approximately $170,000-245,000) – for something in particular. We also get around 1 million hryvnias (approximately $24,500) a month from a partner firm, which is our budget for smaller, urgent requests. And there are also always affiliated third-party fundraisers. For example, Misha Katsurin and Anton Ptushkin raised another million for electronic warfare systems on their YouTube show. Or sometimes people who want to fundraise for their birthday get in touch with us and we tell them what they can open a fundraiser for.

We also host lots of events. Our main budget now comes from the money we raise publicly on social media, mostly smaller donations from private individuals.

But we’re going to start working on getting donations from businesses, which is why we hired two fundraising managers. We’ve not done this systematically until now. We have so far been working on building trust. But we want to be able to be more systematic in our fundraising efforts, which is why we want to bring Ukrainian businesses into the fold and are working with them to set up regular donations to the foundation.

The most successful case 

Our team’s favorite case is a fundraiser we organized for armored personnel carrier (APC) tyres. That fundraiser was impressive both in its conception and in how effective it was. We were able to buy 100 tyres and so give our forces an entire fleet of trophy APCs that were just gathering dust in storage. These tyres used to only be manufactured in Russia and Belarus. A Ukrainian firm developed an equivalent for us.

A group of Ukrainian women joined our fundraiser for the 100 tyres, returning APCs that each cost $500,000 to the front line. For the fundraiser, each of those women raised a certain amount. The fundraiser didn’t just raise money for the military but helped us find lots of new friends.

The most difficult fundraisers

I find fundraising for vehicles or more obscure things, like the ShaBlia modules, the hardest. The ShaBlia fundraiser was one of our longest campaigns, because a bulletproof automated system for machine guns that helps soldiers remotely engage enemy troops is not something everyone knows about. It’s not like the FPVs that you hear about all the time.

It’s easier to fundraise for something more exciting, like drones. But what I like about Shields – and I’m grateful to our team for it – is that we’re often ahead of the curve. When we started the 7 million hryvnia fundraiser for electronic warfare systems, it was difficult to raise the funds, and few people in the military used them. We would tell our subscribers what these electronic warfare systems are and how they’re used. This is another thing I’m grateful to my team for: they do a lot of research in order to be able to communicate these things in ways that are accessible to the public. We described electronic warfare systems as domes that can protect our defenders. Telling people things like that works.

We do a lot of research and often put people from the military in touch with engineers so they can come up with effective solutions together.

Ukrainian production efforts

All the new technologies, everything that’s currently at our forces’ disposal on the front line – everything apart from the heavy weapons supplied by our partners – have been developed in Ukraine. No one else can match our efficacy in creating new solutions because the situation on the front is ever-changing.

Ukrainian engineers are working at an incredible pace to make changes to the technologies they create and ensure they work well on the front. We work with contractors who make drones and electronic warfare systems for us. We’re also working really closely with engineers, even paying for some of the things they’re working on. For example, there’s a team we worked with to design mobile shower and laundry facilities. We were the first ones to do it, but now other foundations and firms are also placing orders with this team.

Ukrainian engineers are incredible. I think that the whole world will look up to Ukrainian military developers. I doubt that anyone can compete with the quality and speed of their work. Their inventions have altered the course of the war.

Response from the military

It’s very important for us to be able to communicate well with the military. There’s something a friend of mine told me that really struck me. He said that he first started volunteering because I inspired him. Eventually that led him to join the army. He volunteered for two years and then joined the army.

Of course we’re just humans and we’re really energized by gratitude. Soldiers are very sincere in their gratitude, we really get to feel it. Charity work is part of a positive cycle. You constantly see it at work. When soldiers text us “We weren’t killed today because of the electronic warfare system you got us,” it gives us strength to keep going.

Cooperating with the government

From the get go, I saw the Shields Foundation and the entire charity sector as a source of help for the government. We never expect anything from the government. We do the work we have carved out for ourselves.

It’s great that municipal governments can now allocate parts of their budget for buying things like drones. But that’s the job for military units. They go to a local government and ask for money, and the government gives it to them. It’s great that this process has been enshrined in law.

There are definitely areas where we clash with government institutions or officials, but I can’t say that they’re putting up obstacles to our work. I don’t think an ideal government is possible; it’s all just down to the people who work there. We want our mistakes to be forgiven but don’t want to forgive the ones made by our government. So I think we’re helping the government.

Of course I would like to draw attention to corruption. But I don’t think it’s something that’s inherent in the government as an institution. It’s about what we pay attention to and care about. Changes are already underway. We all have to contribute. Because the state is made up of all of us.

I was only offered a bribe once in my life. At first I was surprised, but then I just wrote to that person and told them I was disgusted by their offer and that I don’t do stuff like that. They apologized. I was never offered bribes again. I’m not embarrassed to talk about it, and I think if all of us could talk about it openly we’ll have fewer cases of corruption.

Army +1

Every time we ask soldiers what they need, the first thing they say is they need more people. I used to think: How can we help with that? Many of my civilian friends are thinking about joining the military and considering which units to join. There are a lot of brigades that don’t really know how to use social and other media to recruit people.

One of the barriers is the fear many civilians feel when it comes to approaching the military. But the military needs civilians. So we created a bridge of sorts, our Army +1 project, which solves a lot of issues.

We selected five military units that we trust in terms of things from handling paperwork to respectful communication with civilians, and we match people who want to join the military with those units. There are people who’ve used this resource to join the army. I find it very rewarding. I write their names in a notebook and pray for them. [Smiling] Because it’s a huge responsibility.

But I keep in touch with a lot of people in the military. Really a lot. And I know that they’re experiencing a lot of loss – we all see the obituaries on our social media – but not all of those people die. The majority of them don’t die. It’s important to acknowledge that.