Mental Health Ukraine Project #75682

Heal Young Hearts: Support Children in Ukraine

by War Survivors Institute

Project Report | Sep 1, 2026
Heal Young Hearts: Building the Circle of Support

By Iryna Huk | Fund Development Director

This July, our team spent time in Ukraine, meeting with existing partners and building new ones - all in service of one question: how do we build lasting support around the children whose lives have been upended by war?

We visited Sunflower Camp, where children affected by the war spend their summer away from it. We spent time with the Ukraine Volya Foundation and their "Level Up" camp, built around the same idea, that kids need space to rebuild, not just get through. These camps are where Heal Young Hearts starts: safe places where children can simply be children again.

But a summer camp is only as strong as what surrounds it. So we also met with the Child Dignity Center and the Institute of Mental Health, both at Ukrainian Catholic University, whose research and training are shaping how trauma in children and families is understood and treated in Ukraine more broadly. We talked with the Nadija Foundation, a new Scandinavian-Ukrainian initiative building research and rehabilitation infrastructure from the ground up. And we connected with Malteser International, whose psychosocial support work with displaced families and veterans in Ukraine goes back years, and the Superhumans Center in Lviv, where prosthetics, surgery, and psychological care come together for thousands of patients — many of them parents whose recovery shapes their children's.

With each of them, the conversation was the same at its core: where does our experience and expertise actually fit into the work already happening here. Some of these are long-standing relationships. Others are just starting. All of them are shaping how Heal Young Hearts grows.

This summer, we're grateful to GlobalGiving for making it possible to support children in Ukraine, and to every one of you who supports this project. Thank you for standing with us - we're moving forward together.

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Jun 3, 2026
When Sleep Becomes the Battle: A Report from War Survivors Institute

By Michael Hollifield | President & CEO

From Nightmares to Rest: Training Healers

War leaves marks that are not always visible. For many people who have lived through it, the hardest moments come not during the day, but after, in the stillness of the night, when the mind goes back to what the body survived.

Dreams become replays. The mind returns to the moment of the blast, the face of someone lost, the sound of shelling. People wake up exhausted, on edge, unable to separate what happened from what is happening now. This is not weakness. It is what trauma does to the brain - and it affects adults and children alike, across every country where war has touched people's lives.

In Ukraine, the war does not pause. Air raid sirens interrupt school. Nights are spent in shelters. Mornings begin with checking whether everyone is safe. For millions of children, this is not a crisis they are recovering from, it is the reality they are living in right now. But the same is true for a refugee resettled in a new country who cannot sleep in a quiet apartment because the quiet itself feels wrong. Or a mother in the Middle East whose children still flinch at loud sounds years after the bombing stopped.

The geography changes. The experience does not.

Our colleagues who work directly with survivors hear this again and again.

"I wake up and I'm back there."

"I haven't slept through the night in months."

"My child screams in their sleep and I don't know how to help them."

These are not rare cases. They are among the most common things people share when they finally feel safe enough to talk.

This is why War Survivors Institute recently trained social workers and case managers at a refugee resettlement program in Imagery Rehearsal Therapy (IRT) - a method that helps people gradually change the content of recurring trauma nightmares, so that sleep becomes possible again. It is practical, evidence-based, and it works.

One detail stood out: many of the case managers in that room were once refugees themselves. They know this experience from the inside. They are now the ones helping others through it, and they came away with something concrete they can use.

Next, War Survivors Institute is bringing this same training to social workers and mental health professionals in Ukraine — to the people working directly with war-affected children and families every day.

Your support makes the connection happen.

This work continues because you choose to support it. Thank you from everyone it reaches.

Rehearsal therapy training

Art therapy in Lviv

WSI researchers at a conference

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