How to create a successful local group
This guide is intended for individuals who support Ukraine and want to build a local team to support their efforts to help Ukraine win the war. A group of people is usually much more effective than a single individual.
Here are resources to assist pro-Ukraine groups, anywhere around the world.
Group goals
What will your group do to help defend Ukraine? Most groups either focus on the below topics:
- Equipment for Ukraine’s military – Fundraising, buying and shipping critical supplies to Ukraine’s military. These often include drones, night vision, vehicles, winter clothing, medical equipment and the other million things it takes to win a war.
- Political advocacy (lobbying) – encouraging the US government (and/or other governments) to better support Ukraine
- Public awareness – Ufortunately most Americans and even many ukrainian-Americans remain ignorant to the importance of the conflict in Ukraine, as well as how they can help. There are many ways groups are educating Americans how and why to get involved.
Fundraising for Ukraine
Fundraising is a critical task for any group. Equipment-providers obviously must buy the equipment somehow, while even advocacy organizations must pay for flights, letters, meeting space, etc.
There are many ways to fundraise. Contact us for suggestions and advice.
Meetings!
The secret sauce to building a team is meetings. If you don’t have millions of dollars, then you have to “pay” to build the group with time. Time to meet people and build trust with them. Weekly meetings are the typical schedule. Best to meet at a Ukrainian restaurant or community center but anywhere will work.
Pick a location and evening that should work most of the time, for most attendees. Try not to change either.
At your meetings, make sure to collect new attendee’s phone numbers. Few people check their emails nowadays. It’s critical to get phone numbers.
The first few meetings will likely be chaotic and unstructured, but eventually you will want to define your goals, key organizers, upcoming pro-UA events to attend, etc. Create an agenda beforehand and send out a recap afterwards. We can help you draft up both.
Identify who will be the group’s leader (likely but not necessarily you), the Social Media team, who will be in charge of lobbying, contacting news media, etc. They all should report progress each week.
Group promotion
- Meetup – meetup.com is a useful platform to advertise your group. If you don’t have a website, it can serve as your website until you get one. We can show you how to setup a group in Meetup and setup your events. As an example, here is UDS’s Meetup group.
- Printed “lit” (printed materials to hand out) – Contact us for posters, fliers, banners, etc to help promote your own local group. Examples:
- UDS Trifold Brochure.pdf
- UDS 8.5×11” Portrait Poster.jpg
- UDS 4-to-a-Page Postcard.jpg
- UDS 3×6′ Banner.pdf
- “Arm Ukriane Now” poster
- Contact us for more resources
- Contact local UA community. Invite the top people for coffee or lunch. Attend any pro-UA events, maybe in Legionaire uniform.
- Carl’s contacts – I have a number of contacts such as Ukrainian Honorary Consuls that can help.
- Churches – any UA churches nearby should help
- Local media – local news might mention your events
- Social media – post your group events anywhere local people could see it. Let Carl know if you need any help creating/managing social media accounts.
- Libraries, community centers, etc
