The Forgotten Ones: NYC’s Hidden Ukrainian Refugee Crisis and Those Fighting It
In New York City, people usually meet their next-door neighbors in passing — maybe in an elevator, or the lobby — but Zoe Blazhkevich has a different story.
Blazhkevich, who works with organizations aiding Ukrainian refugees in NYC, was parceling through a list of those in need of resources when she came across a woman living with two young children and an elderly mother. She called the family and completed an assessment of their situation, but after hanging up, had a strange urge to call back.
Following a short conversation, the two women realized not only did they live in the same apartment building — but right next door. “Now we are all friends,” Blazhkevich exclaims. “We go to the beach together and play cards together.”
Their newfound friendship has served as a respite. Since February, Russia’s brutal full-scale invasion of Ukraine has displaced over 7 million Ukrainians. While Poland and Germany are receiving the most refugees, the number of Ukrainians arriving in the United States is growing, now reaching 100,000, with the majority living in New York City. Ukrainian Americans such as Blazhkevich, living in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach and Coney Island, have witnessed firsthand the immense struggles of refugees after fleeing their war-torn homeland.
But while there is plenty of awareness and support for the war efforts in Ukraine, there is little support for their journey once in New York. So charities are filling the gap.
Blazhkevich works with Your Kindness, one of two local charities that have come together to create the Ukrainian Refugee Relief Program, designed to provide aid for newly arriving refugees. The Your Kindness Fund and the Skyline Charitable Foundation are working to raise funds and organize events throughout the city while aiding Ukrainian refugees with legal assistance and nutritional support.
“The refugees arrive in New York and are often traumatized and unable to speak English,” said Blazhkevich. And while they do have temporary housing with sponsors, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services requires asylum seekers to wait at least 180 days to receive a work permit, making it near impossible for already struggling Ukrainian refugees to earn a living.
The Your Kindness Fund was established in 2017 with a primary focus on childhood development in the Ukraine, but following the invasion, pivoted to supporting refugees displaced across the world, specifically in New York. The team, composed of Ukrainian-Americans, is working to provide necessary aid, but it is still an upward battle.
“We did a needs assessment, and we have a database of hundreds of families,” says Yana Krasnikova, the Foundation Director of Your Kindness.
Krasnikova is no stranger to the Ukrainian community as the former Miss Ukraine 2017. Krasnikova and her team, as well as local Ukrainian Americans like Blazhkevich, quickly noticed the abundance of Ukrainian families arriving in New York lacking employment and adequate economic stability.
While most of the refugees’ answers showed they needed employment, the fund cannot bypass the work authorization waiting time, Krasnikova said. But the other main need was food, a request the fund could meet.
“We have been distributing grocery store gift cards to families,” explains Krasnikova. “We gather information, we contact families and pay special attention to families with children, and we distribute to a little over 100 families here in New York City.”
To maximize the number of refugees served by Your Kindness, the organization partnered with the Skyline Charitable Foundation. In August, the team hosted a large fundraiser at Coney Island Brewery to raise money for gift cards and build awareness for the locality of refugee struggles.
“Through that, we were able to raise about $8,000, and have since utilized all the funding to purchase additional grocery cards for those that sign up on the needs assessment form,” says Shana McCormick, the executive director of Skyline Charitable Foundation.
Both Krasnikova and McCormick hope to host another fundraiser soon and continue to raise funds to purchase more gift cards. Because 95% of the arriving Ukrainian refugees in NYC are women and children, providing nutritional support has been crucial, and their approach toward providing gift cards helps ease the intense culture shock felt by displaced Ukrainians.
“When it came to food relief, we decided to start purchasing gift cards to local grocery stores so that they would be able to purchase their own culturally relevant food,” explains McCormick. “Food that they were maybe used to cooking at home, instead of giving them prepared meals that maybe they weren’t interested in.”
While these organizations devote large amounts of time and money to ease the burden of displacement, there are still inherent, immense troubles stemming from forced migration apparent in the community of refugees.
“They would much rather be in their country and love their country. Especially Ukrainians, they’re extremely hardworking and proud people,” says Krasnikova. “More than 60% of them have tertiary degrees like a university education or some kind of special skill, and it’s a really big problem because a lot of degrees and diplomas don’t translate, so there’s definitely a lot of hardships in that sense.”
The inability to work — coupled with language barriers, PTSD, and culture shock — results in great adversity for the newly arriving Ukrainians, subjects said.
“Americans see a lot of support for Ukraine on the streets because we’re a big community. We protest and are proud and loud,” says Krasnikova.
But still, she worries that people will only focus on the ongoing armed conflict overseas, rather than the ongoing refugee crisis close to home.
“We still have people coming in that are within that waiting period and don’t really have much assistance and this type of support is very valuable and needed,” emphasizes McCormick when asked about the future of the aid program. “It takes a village, they say, which is very true… but we’ll continue to do what we can.”
