When I first arrived in Poland, I felt alone, as if I had stepped into a world where I didn’t belong. The language barrier made everything more difficult—making friends, understanding lessons, and even simple conversations. I was afraid to speak, afraid people would laugh at my mistakes. But when I finally worked up the courage, I was met with kindness. People didn’t mock me; they encouraged me. This gave me the motivation to keep learning, to keep trying, and to believe that I could find my place in this new world. 

Before volunteering with the UN, Pavlo Tishkov crunched numbers at the National Bank of Ukraine. But when war broke out, spreadsheets weren’t enough—he wanted to make a real difference.

Tetiana Mykytenko serves with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in Czechia. She wanted to do something positive even as things looked bleak in her home country, Ukraine. She sought refugee in Czechia and that's when she joined UNHCR as a UN Volunteer Refugee Community-Based Protection Assistant. 

I started volunteering and interning throughout my bachelor's degree in international relations from the University of York. I volunteered with the Ukrainian Institute in London and TEDxLondon, among others. It was then that I found an interesting UNV online volunteer assignment with the Accelerator Lab of the UN Development Programme (UNDP) in Ukraine, which required a translator for five months. 

UN Volunteers have played invaluable roles in UN humanitarian assistance from the first days of war in Ukraine and UNV is committed to staying and delivering in support of millions of displaced people.

Refugee UN Volunteers are integral and invaluable members of the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) team in Slovakia. They mirror to UNHCR colleagues the day-to-day life, challenges and resilience of Ukrainian refugees. Tetiana Korshun and Olena Bilinska, UN Volunteer Protection Assistants with UNHCR in Slovakia,​​​ are based in Kosice and Bratislava, respectively. They support UNHCR in communicating with refugee communities.

 The war in Ukraine triggered a drastic increase in humanitarian needs, as services were disrupted, and civilians fled the fighting. The United Nations, non-governmental and refugee-led organizations, charitable funds and national volunteer centres have been working around the clock. However, the longer the war continues, the more extensive the aid, protection and health needs will become.

Since 2007, more than 95 UN Volunteers have been engaged with OCHA in Latin America and the Caribbean and 30 in Europe and Central Asia. In Ukraine, OCHA successfully used UN Volunteers to scale up its humanitarian response to COVID-19 in the face of escalating needs. 

Online Volunteers are valuable assets in implementing projects that require data analysis and digital technologies. The SDG AI Lab at UNDP Istanbul International Center for Private Sector in Development (IICPSD) brought together over 100 Online Volunteers from 45 countries under its Volunteer Data Scientists initiative, a partnership with the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) programme.