On 15th and 16^th of September 2020, the country research workshop for Ukraine has been organized in a full on-line mode with twelve local and four remote participants.

The goal of the workshop was to discuss the findings of the international research and national research carried out under the leadership of the Resilience Advisers Network. These findings were put in perspective in order to identify main directions for the elaboration of a volunteer development plan and cooperation model to be signed between the State Emergency Service of Ukraine, the targeted local communities and the Ukrainian Red Cross Society.  

The Ukraine group was composed of staff members and volunteers of the Ukrainian Red Cross Society and representatives of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine. International participants belonged to the Austrian Red Cross and the Resilience Advisers Network.

Oleksandr Sienkov, Head of the Emergency Response Unit of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine, briefly presented information about the current experience of cooperation between SESU and volunteers’ groups. Then the Ukrainian Red Cross Society introduced the main lessons learned from the past DRM projects they implemented in the country.

The following six sessions were organized according to the six processes defined by the capacity building process model selected for the research methodology; Business (B), Customer (C), Integration (I), Operation (O), Delivery (D) and Regulation (R).

During the discussions the following issues were highlighted by the participants:

• According to Ukrainian Law, State Emergency Services of Ukraine (SESU) cannot involve volunteers directly to the response activities, but they could involve the specialists who would be able to support SESU with the consultations and technical support.
• SESU can involve trained volunteers to support in providing assistance out of the red zone but in green zone of the emergency
• Red Cross volunteers in Chernivtsi and representatives of SESU Department in Chernivtsi had joint operations on emergency response to floods on the region
• The experience from Odesa has been mentioned as positive point. Cooperation was established between SESU and the association of volunteer fire fighters in Odesa with some involvements of RC. They worked together in the frame of the Plan of cooperation. This experience could be used as a model of cooperation with volunteers.

The outputs of the workshop have been used to finalize the Ukraine country report and the guiding principles (to upload in the page ‘’resources’’ of this website) and should be used by project team to elaborate the volunteer development plan and cooperation model/cooperation agreement.