 How do you persuade someone to stop bombing civilian areas? Not to recruit children as soldiers or that they shouldn't raid villages to pillage the only food supply. There has never been a greater need for effective advocacy for the protection of civilians in conflict and crisis. But how do we do this protection advocacy? What skills and techniques can we use? How can we identify decision makers? What tactics work? And how can we manage risks? Welcome to the Advocating for Protection podcast where we bring you the real experiences of advocates in conflict and crisis. In each episode, you'll hear from those who are lobbying in the corridors of the UN buildings in New York. Those who are face to face with armed actors at the front line of conflict zones and everything in between. They will tell us about their personal experiences, their successes, but also the challenges and how they overcame them. This podcast comes to you from the Global Protection Cluster's Advocacy Working Group. Please be aware that it contains discussions of violence, abuse and exploitation faced by civilians in conflict and crisis. Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Advocating for Protection podcast. My name is Vittorio Infante and I work at Oxfam International as EU Conflict and Humanitarian Advisor. And I'm joined today by two colleagues from Ukraine. Oksana Geddes from the Organization Right to Protection based in Lviv. I'm Oksana Geddes and I serve as a advocacy coordinator at the Right to Protection Charitable Foundation. It's leading an Ukrainian national human rights and humanitarian organization and the UNHCR partner, dedicating to supporting conflict affected populations, refugees, stateless persons and engaging in disaster risk reduction efforts. And Irina Chayka from the Legal Development Network and today she's joining us from Central Ukraine. I'm Irina Chayka and I'm from the Legal Development Network where I serve as the Organizational Development Director and our organization unites 22 organizations from all over Ukraine. We provide legal services as well as we deal with humanitarian issues since February 24. Fantastic and welcome again to you both. How did you get into the kind of legal and protection work in the humanitarian setting? And also how is that connected to your own personal experience of living in Ukraine after the 24th of February 2022 invasion? I started my legal job almost 15 years ago and firstly I worked with people from Kharkiv region who needed some free legal aid and we went to local communities worked with local authorities and we tried to learn people's needs. And then after the COVID pandemic started I decided to change my work from the state organization and I turned to NGO to the Legal Development Network and here I started the wonderful journey with grassroots initiatives and with the local organizations to provide legal services so precise to that people who need them. So the service provision during the pandemic was a real challenge for me because we couldn't provide the service in person. We had to find some way how to connect with people in villages where there is no internet connection or we are whereas mobile operators which work in Poland for example. So it was the challenge and when we overcame that then started the full-scale invasion. I remember the day before February 24 I was sitting with my baby it was just one month and a half and I was planning a Zoom with my colleagues. We had to plan an advocacy campaign in small territory communities. So the aim was that the local authorities provide money and human resources to build up the legal service in the community. And we were planning that and one of my colleagues said that it is possible that we don't meet tomorrow. It was a real joke for me. I couldn't believe that but the early morning we woke up because of missiles were striking infrastructure in Harkin. That's a very telling experience that as a human rights advocate you had first to contend with the lockdown and all the challenges that that created and then on top of that came this huge problem with the conflict and in particular the targeting of civilians with heavy weaponry like artillery, missiles. So thanks for sharing that Irina. I am sure that that must have been very very difficult to contend with. And I wonder in what way has that then changed your trajectory both personally as a humanitarian practitioner and also for the organization for the legal development network. So the first six or seven hours I don't remember we were relocating from our flat to the parking and then we started with my colleagues activities to provide our staff in different oblasts of Ukraine evacuation packages for them. We found places our colleagues can come to. We found drivers who can take these people from the occupied territories and let them go to the Ukrainian controlled territories. We also tried to provide some psychological help to our colleagues because we had some of them with little babies in big cities. And then we understood it was the second or the third day of the full invasion, I believe. We understood that in the communities in the west of Ukraine where we were relocated in we have to provide not legal services, some humanitarian services. We started with housing banks. We went to small villages. We went to flat owners in cities. We asked them to give their contacts and to provide their flats and houses for IDPs. In the first week we had more than 100 contacts and places where people could find the place for them. Then we started to gather the IDPs in the communities and to talk to them in order they didn't have this trauma syndrome. They could see the people with the same experience. Then two months or three months later we started to help the IDPs to find jobs. So we gave them the opportunity to learn a new profession. The people who were some mechanicals or who worked in some plants they became SMM specialists or they became cookers. Then we tried to integrate them in the life of the local communities. That's excellent to hear. I think it also is quite inspiring how you went from the provision of legal aid to becoming a full-fledged humanitarian actor. That's what happens when crisis and conflict starts. The community mobilizes and based on what's happening on the ground they roll up their sleeves and they work all together to find solutions. Going back to Xenia, how about you? What has been your experience as a humanitarian professional and how is that reflected on the work as well of right to protection? I need to confess that I'm in new to this area at all because before the full-scale invasion I had a thriving career as a partner of a law firm and as a lawyer practicing in corporate IT contracts, tax law and court practice. However, everything has changed on February 24th, 2022 and while witnessing the human suffering and devastation caused by war of aggression of Russian Federation deeply affected me. I could not simply stand aside or be indifferent to the plight of conflict-affected populations so I felt some kind of profound call to serve to make a difference to offer help and compassion to people affected by the war. From the first days I became actively involved in some volunteering efforts providing food, preparing food, providing clothes, medicine, opening my apartment for displaced persons. Additionally, I completed paramedic courses so I could provide some essential medical assistance to people injured by the war. Finally, I adopted two dogs that were left behind in the water areas of Harkiv and Herzog. To be honest, I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have joined R2P Charitable Foundation and I lovingly named our team like Dream Team because our organization comprises people who are brave, resilient, with kind hearts and selfless desire to help to assist those who are suffering from the consequences of the war. Hearing the two of you speak I think it's remarkable to say the least you know how on the basis of your legal background you then got involved as I was just saying in frontline response first-hand support to the community, to the individuals who have been made homeless and displaced by the war or affected in any other ways. I mean you were saying for example how important it became to provide communities and displaced individuals with job opportunities, housing, opening up your apartment. As you've done, Senya, I'm not surprised that it has had a very big impact both on your organizations but also on a deeper personal level. So if we wanted to zoom out and looking at the wider context so we have 6.5 million refugees in neighboring countries as well as other parts of Europe and we have about 5.4 million internally displaced people. So in terms of the key problems that you're trying to solve both as R2P and legal development network can you tell us you know what are maybe one or two issues that your organization is focusing on and how you're trying to kind of solve those problems as well as humanitarians? I need to say that now like after the full-scale invasion of Russian Federation R2P operates in 22 regions over a thousand co-workers. So after the armed aggression in 2022 R2P changed its structure launching new aid direction for IDPs and conflict-affected populations. Its mental health and psychological support, social protection, camp coordination and camp management, CCCM, CASH program and Incider assistance. Moreover after them destruction on June 6, 2023 we launched mobile team to Herson which consists of our colleagues who provide psychological support, legal aid, social services and protection monitoring. So I believe that the main issue that we need to address as a result of full-scale invasion is first of all access to basic services such as medical services, social protection, employment, education, access to documentation for example by establishing administrative procedure for people who were born on temporarily occupied territories to obtain documents like for example birth certificates. And we also need to address the challenges of housing destruction, all the housing issues because we do understand that 130,000 people are living in collective sites and our monitoring show that these places are not equipped with proper conditions. For example, a lot of them are not equipped for people with disabilities, for families with children and it's a real problem. And one more thing, it's the necessity to provide resources and transparent procedure for compensation for destroyed housing and procedure for compensation for injuries caused by war. I would like to reflect on that. Aksana said according to the basic services and meeting basic needs. So let's have a look at how an IDP moves from his or her home to another community. So when an IDP comes to a new place, this person is disoriented, the person is traumatized. In the most cases, this person doesn't get the appropriate flat or house. The person doesn't know where he or she can get money from, where to get some services and so on. Our mission here is to develop an infrastructure for IDPs in the communities. As I mentioned, we developed housing banks in communities in three oblasts of Ukraine and we have back offices to administrate these housing banks. So we have people can call and ask for housing. We communicate and coordinate with other humanitarian organizations who provide some humanitarian needs as food needs or medical needs or baby needs or whatever the person needs. But the problem here is that the human-terrain aid providers sometimes don't know precisely what their beneficiaries need. So we had a situation one week ago. We went to McLeod and Heerson Oblasts and we were in little communities. Near our car was driving four, three other organizations' cars and the workers of the humanitarian organizations who came to these people, they asked them, so what are your needs? People listed some more materials for rebuilding houses, some more clothes and so on. And these workers left the communities and some time is gone but the people didn't get any feedback. And the people from our perspective, they get once again traumatized and they lose the trust to any humanitarian or other service providers. So we try to deal with that. We try to coordinate with the aid providers in order to know what resources, what materials for people they have. What needs can we meet at once? For example, we know that Organization A has some medical kids and we see an old woman who needs some medicines so we connect with that Organization A and just ask for these kids the woman get them in one or two days and so she's happy her needs are met. Then we work with local authorities. In two communities we have real results when the local authorities have enough capacity to build the service and we have to expertise how these services can be built. In these two communities we have programs for finding working places for IDPs for housing. So the local authority now is looking for houses and flats, not we. We are just back office to administrate this process but the local authority is the leader now. We also have hostels for IDPs where they can find temporary place and so a short time to recover to find their place in this community. What strikes me is this element around, for example, access to basic services which are crucial for anyone in ordinary times and even more so at the times of conflict and crisis, right? You need to know whether you can get access to a doctor if your children can go to school, if you can get a job or if you cannot get if you have any kind of social support offered by the state. I wondered now if you could tell me a little bit about how do you work with those state institutions who look after those services and understanding how do you build a relationship with those institutions and what kind of advocacy has worked better? Is it more like a collaboration or a partnership or is it more oriented towards keeping decision makers accountable so doing scrutiny of the decisions and so on? I believe that it's very important to establish proper collaboration with state authorities. For example, R2P is a member of Coordination Quarter for Protection of IDPs' Rights. So we have every Friday meetings with representatives of all state authorities reveal pending problems, pending needs of conflict-affected populations and to address them immediately, urgently. Also R2P is a member of different task force working groups for elaborating necessary legal drafts, laws and by-laws. So, for example, R2P was participating in drafting legislation for housing assistance for IDPs. We were drafting also regulations like jointly with Ombudsman Office and representatives of Ministry of Reintegration, TCM Cluster and UNHCR. We were having such kind of task force for drafting this regulation on collective sites to ensure minimal standards for dignified conditions for IDPs in collective sites, providing social services for conflict-affected populations and vulnerable groups. And as well, we very closely working in the field with local authorities to establish some capacity-building activities for them to make local authorities able to address immediate needs of displaced people. How do we work with the local authorities? A very interesting question because it was our aim since 2009. We developed the organizational capacity of our member organizations to provide legal services and to collaborate with the local authorities before February 24. Our collaboration was about legal services provision. But since February 24, we talk about the IDPs' needs and our form of collaboration looks now like our member organizations and the legal development network provide some social service or we talk to people, for example, during some focus groups. We find out what are the people needs, where these people came from. In our communities, we know how many people are from what communities, what are their plans, do they want to come back home or do they want to stay in this community. Then we come to the local authority and we suggest an action plan to provide these people, these IDPs with legal, humanitarian, psychological aid, maybe with financing of the community on these resources. Talking about some advocacy campaigns, we try to have an advocacy team which is represented by a local organization, by the national organization and we also have some actors, for example, from public sectors or from other big NGOs or charity foundations who can be a third part and help to find the appropriate clue to the local authority. Eksenia, you talked about influencing national legislation and reminding as well your authorities about what are the critical gaps or needs of collective sites and what people expect to find in those collective sites as well as basic services. As you were saying, Irina, how has that kind of advocacy worked when you partnered, for example, with international mechanisms like the protection cluster or you mentioned the camp management cluster, is there an added value of working with other actors and coordinating with them? When we started working with the protection cluster, our local organizations, our member organizations started to collaborate with the IDPs councils in their communities and our work in the protection cluster demonstrates that we have a strong potential to coordinate among all organizations, different services providers to meet a precise need of a concrete person and one of the opportunities which is very important for the LDN now is to build up a kind of a marketplace for different kinds of aid IDPs can get from aid providers. So it could be like the protection cluster unites different service providers. And when we have such a kind of marketplace, we can see what opportunities for people, for example, rebuilding the houses, what materials are available, what medicine, what doctors work or food, what are in the storages, then legal providers, who can we address the person to? And when any actor who is connected to this marketplace comes to a community, comes to an IDP, the person can easily look through the opportunities, find what the person needs, find what he can give this person and just meet the person's needs because I would like to say once again people lose trust to us and in order all our mechanisms, national, local, any mechanisms we try to give to our beneficiaries. In order they work, we have to have the trust from these people to our services, to us as service providers. And I would like to compliment that engaging with the national protection cluster allows organizations to work closely with local authorities and also it provides an access to information, especially if it's information on or challenges that local communities are facing as well as it's a great platform like for research sharing that what Irina said. And it's like the place where representatives from different NGOs could come together, share the information, coordinate their efforts to avoid some kind of overlapping or duplicating. It's also very important. One final question that I have for you is what would you say to other national NGOs that in other settings in other countries might have to do that kind of rapid scale up that both right to protection and the legal development network did. We talked about going from legal aid to providing services in a practical way to also combining that with advocacy. Based on what you learned in the last 18 months what would be one key lesson that you would like to share with our colleagues from the rest of the world if they were to face a similar challenge? I believe that any advocacy should be data-driven and it has to be based on real needs assessment as well as clearly advocacy objectives should be identified. And we need also to emphasize the importance of networking and Alliance building because it definitely helps to build the stronger advocacy initiative and it helps to implement it effectively. So from the Alliance perspective you should know everything about the community you work with so about people, about resources, about the capacities, everything. And as Saxana mentioned data-driven campaigns and data-driven programs for this community. Second, you have to connect to work with organizations with strong capacities both NGOs and local authorities. If there are none of them in this community and that the third point, you need to develop this capacity. Without it there won't be any success in this community. And the fourth and the most important point is that find the way to trust from people to your work. It's very important. So capacity building, data-driven campaigns and the trust. Thank you very much to you both for those final remarks. It's been a very insightful and refreshing experience for me to learn about your work. And I just wanted to thank you both on behalf of the Advocacy Working Group and the Protection Cluster for being a guest on the Advocacy for Protection podcast. So thank you, Xenia and thank you Irina and I wish you good luck with the very valuable and brave work that you're doing. Thank you for the possibility to join the podcast. We are honored to be here. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for these conversations and with hope for future collaboration. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Advocating for Protection podcast. It's produced by the Global Protection Cluster's Advocacy Working Group, which is co-led by Save the Children in Oxfam and includes members from National and International NGOs and UN agencies. You can find out more information about the Advocacy Working Group on globalprotectioncluster.org. Look out for the Protection Advocacy Toolkit whilst on this website and if you have feedback or suggestions for future episodes, email us at protectionteamatoxfam.org.