From Ukraine: A new model for supporting civil society under stress

Ukrainian civil society is operating in a state of radical simultaneity

Since the start of the full-scale invasion, Ukrainian civil society organisations (CSOs) have been asked to do the impossible.

They are simultaneously:

• fighting for survival today
• repairing what was broken yesterday
• preparing for the future that must come tomorrow

This condition of “radical simultaneity” fundamentally changes what organisational support needs to look like. Yet much of international funding architecture is designed on the basis of assumptions that apply to a more stable environment: predictable timelines, separated sectors of expertise and organisations with sufficient bandwidth to absorb constant project delivery and reporting pressures.

At the same time, international funders face a genuine dilemma. Many want to engage local actors directly and advance localisation. But some organisational systems have not been designed to international standards, while leaders and teams are operating under enormous psychological strain and exhaustion.

And yet, what we witness in Ukraine is not collapse. It is extraordinary vitality, creativity, courage, and adaptability under immense pressure – alongside undeniable fragility.

This tension became the starting point for our research question:

How can outsiders best support Ukrainian CSOs during wartime?

Our research combined over 20 interviews, an organisational development (OD) ecosystem mapping, six case studies, desk research and a collaborative inquiry with practitioners and organisations working directly in the field.

What emerged challenged many of our original assumptions.

Engaging with the reality on the ground

One common assumption is that organisational development support is a “luxury” for stable environments. In crisis, so the logic goes, organisations need only operational funding and emergency resilience support.

Instead, we observed something very different.

In conditions of prolonged uncertainty and exhaustion, reclaiming a sense of agency becomes essential to organisational survival. Strategic reflection, collective sense-making and clarity of direction are not distractions from urgent work – they become vehicles for regeneration.

Another assumption was that wartime conditions are too chaotic for meaningful strategy development.

In practice, Ukrainian organisations often needed strategy even more. Under conditions of radical uncertainty, strategic discussions helped teams make decisions, prioritise, communicate internally and preserve focus amid constant external pressure.

We also traditionally approach psychosocial support and organisational development to function as largely separate domains.

Instead, we repeatedly observed that care became more accessible and culturally acceptable when embedded within organisational strengthening processes. Teams were often more willing to engage in reflection, decompression, emotional processing and leadership support when these were integrated into organisational strengthening – as if they were accepting the importance of ensuring the sustainability of their work leads them to acknowledge the need to take care of their own sustainability – as a contribution to their mission rather than as an individual protection.

The most important innovation was relational

The central insight emerging from this work was not primarily technical.

It was relational.

We began describing the approach that emerged as Regenerative Organisational Development: a trauma-aware, human-centred approach to organisational change that combines structural strengthening with care and reflection, enabling organisations to sustain agency, adapt to crisis and regenerate their capacity for purposeful action.

In practice, this meant integrating organisational strengthening with intentional spaces for decompression, reflection, emotional processing and reconnection to meaning and purpose.

The approach built upon organisational development methodologies developed by PeaceNexus Foundation in fragile and conflict-affected contexts, while adapting them to the specific realities of wartime Ukraine. It also becomes a contributor to Robert Bosch Foundation’s continuous work on responsible investment in local actors.

Participating organisations received flexible organisational development grants alongside accompaniment by two interconnected advisers: one focused on strategy and systemic change, and another focused on people, leadership dynamics and care. Grants could be used flexibly for organisational and team needs. Around 20% of the funding was available as flexible overhead and core support.

Importantly, the process aimed to honour the agency of local partners – not only in strategic choices, but also in pacing, priorities, and how support was shaped and delivered.

This mattered because wartime trauma does not only affect individuals. It affects organisational cultures, communication patterns, decision-making, trust, conflict dynamics and the capacity to dream and imagine the future.

The organisations we worked with did not simply need “capacity building.” They needed conditions that allowed them to continue functioning as living systems.

Why this matters beyond Ukraine

The implications extend beyond one country or one war.

If philanthropy and international cooperation are serious about localisation, then support models themselves must evolve. Localisation cannot simply mean transferring more operational responsibility onto local actors while maintaining systems built primarily around control, short-term outputs and donor predictability.

It requires greater trust, flexibility and recognition that organisational health is not secondary to impact – it is part of the infrastructure that makes meaningful impact possible.

This is not only an issue of effectiveness. It is also about ethics and risk mitigation.

Organisations operating under prolonged pressure can produce remarkable results for a period of time. But without regenerative mechanisms, exhaustion accumulates invisibly until systems begin to fracture.

What we observed in Ukraine suggests that supporting organisations as human systems – not merely delivery mechanisms – can strengthen both resilience and long-term societal capacity.

The invitation emerging from this work is relatively simple, but potentially transformative:

• What if, alongside funding projects, we invested more intentionally in organisations and teams themselves?
• What if we paid greater attention not only to outputs, but also to local partners’ sustained capacity to act?
• And what if localisation required not less structure, but different structures – built around trust, accompaniment, flexibility and shared learning?

Our current systems are often not designed for this. Which is precisely why the way forward will likely depend on greater collaboration, co-creation and openness to rethinking how support itself is organised.

Wartime Ukraine may be offering an early glimpse of what effective support to civil society will need to look like in an era of prolonged crises.