“Once at one of the classes, while I was a first-year student at the Faculty of Psychology at TSNUK our lecturer said: “As a psychologist, you can be an educator, scientist, and practitioner”. So, here I am many years later — Assistant Professor at TSNUK, researcher (who has obtained PhD and continues further), and practitioner who works as a person-centered counselor. And it is a real pleasure for me to use all that experience in projects like Who Cares, which brings the gap between academia and practice in different countries perspective in times of crises and emergent settings”.
Meet Ms Olha Shevchuk
Psychologist and researcher in the framework of the Who Cares project, which represents Ukraine on the part of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. Some of the tasks performed: discovering the needs and challenges of helpers, collecting experiences and best practices on how to support frontliners, working on the research methodology and conduction, finding the ways to address the discovered gaps, online media library enrichment, Ukrainian network development, trainings coordination, etc.
Links
Links are one of the main lessons learned and best practices discovered throughout the years of the Who Cares project partnership.
Links with true professionals. For TSNUK representatives Who Cares project started even before 2023. Since in 2022 the armed conflict started in the Ukraine our colleagues from Austria and Germany wrote to ask whether we need any kind of support that they can provide. It is also one of the lessons – to go there to the people who require your support and be there with them. This is how we started to provide lectures and workshops for students and practitioners. Through this cooperation, it was evident that we needed to continue to work with the requests and all the different experiences our colleagues had as local citizens and as professionals. It is evident that armed conflict brings a lot of stress, and still, it also reflects in a lot of new needs that the frontliners have. So, we came there with the next lesson:
Links between academia and practice representatives. That is the way we can mutually support and enrich others through the knowledge obtained, both in research and practice. Part of my involvement in the conflict as a frontliner was to work as a psychologist in one of the international humanitarian organizations in 2022. There I had a clear understanding that frontliners and helpers themselves should be taken care of. So, when within the Who Cares project, we started to find out the needs and the best practices that the helpers were using in our research and our national networks’ cooperation – it was something up to the right time and place. For instance, we have found out that not only does vicarious traumatization affect our colleagues, but it is vicarious resilience that helps us to continue daily. It also brings us to the last, but not least lesson:
Links between different countries’ perspectives. All our consortium partner countries have different experiences when we talk about armed conflicts, emergencies, etc. Armenia, Austria, Georgia, and Ukraine have such experience and face its consequences, both from a historical perspective and in acute response. We have learned that while working on the online media library materials – even though some materials are specific to the country’s realities, some were true to all the consortium partners involved. For example, self-help techniques for the frontliners are more or less universal (but it is still important not only to know them, but also to implement them), but, for example, we all need to learn something new about how to work with people who left their homes and moved elsewhere seeking safety, both within our own countries or abroad. We as Ukrainians are very grateful and admire our colleagues in Armenia, Austria, and Georgia who supported Ukrainians abroad. Your involvement is something that can inspire us to continue our work.
To link and sum it all up, we can remember: truly being there for others and being open to the otherness of the other in the best way possible sometimes is the best you can offer in every unique case. So go and be there with the ones who need you, both your beneficiaries and colleagues.