Marcin Skrzypek

Social humanitarian aid for refugees from Ukraine in 2022 can and should be described in the language of modern development methods. Maybe thanks to this we will understand that it was not just an instinctive reaction dictated by compassion, but an advanced mechanism that can be built consciously and used every day for our own good and cities’ resilience.

I was out of Lublin on Thursday 24 February. On Saturday, my wife texted me that we would be hosting refugees. On Sunday, I found Mrs Irina already in our living room with her daughters Vika and Katya and grandson Tymoshka. They were brought to us by a Ukrainian volunteer assistant, on whose further help we could count when needed. All this was possible because, within two days of the outbreak of war, an entry form in Google Forms for people offering their homes for refugees was opened and the whole home-sharing support system was set up in Lublin, but above all because many people were willing to host refugees in their homes. And so, behind each fact there are further facts. This article attempts to identify which of them were crucial to the final outcome.

Facts

Organising private housing for refugees was just one of many activities of the Lublin Social Committee to Aid Ukraine, which was already working in full swing at the time. It was only one of many other similar institutional, social and individual initiatives in Lublin. One of them was a private centre at 5 Liliowa Street, which, thanks to the commitment of three people, helped to accommodate 2 000 refugees in other European countries in two months by sending an average of more than 30 people a day to the West.

As for my family, its life is closely linked to other cultures, including Ukrainian, as my wife and I are active in the St Nicholas Orchestra, a folk band that started its career in the 80s by playing traditional songs from Ruthenian villages in the Polish Carpathians. When, 30 years ago, we were returning home with a bunch of friends from the Czarnohora mountains, we got stuck in Chernivtsi late at night. A local resident took us in for the night, although he could not see us, and we could not see him, as the street lights were off. His wife was a little surprised, but we got a room at their house with a bathroom, dinner and breakfast. Such things are impossible to forget.

By April 2022, 1,200,000 Ukrainian citizens arrived at Lublin, of which 138,000 had spent there at least one night. At the end of March they accounted for 17% of the population of the city (68,000 people). The Committee itself found accommodation for 1,668 people (531 families) for three months, and answered 14,670 calls to the municipal helpline. In addition, it ran 14 emergency shelters with around 1,500 beds, which during this time provided more than 102,500 overnight stays as well as served 150,000 meals and issued 39,500 food packets. 80 truckloads and 68 other transports of humanitarian aid were dispatched. With the Committee’s support, 1196 Ukrainian citizens found employment, including 64 teachers in 41 Lublin schools.

What relevance does all this have for us today, apart from being now archival data that enhance our self-satisfaction from doing good job? We have proved that we can improvise and mobilise en masse when necessary. But after all, it was more than that. Humanitarian aid on this scale required a sophisticated network of grassroots cooperation between people themselves and between people and institutions.

If we cannot see it, perhaps we lack the right concepts and metaphors? Why was that system created at all? What factors determined it, what fostered it? This article attempts to answer these questions, while also proposing a certain set of useful concepts so that we know how to cooperate in this way, not only for others in times of distress and disaster, but also on a daily basis with each other for each other. Let us start looking for those concepts, beginning with the term “personal training,” which a basic notion of modern development.

A month and a half after the outbreak of war in Ukraine, I conducted three interviews about the social commitment of local people to help refugees in Lublin. My interlocutors were Rafal “Koza” Kozinski, director of the Lublin Cultural Centre, and Piotr Skrzypczak from the Homo Faber association, who co-founded the Lublin Social Committee to Aid Ukraine, as well as Olga, Łukasz and Marcin from the private, informal refugee aid centre “Liliowa 5.” The interviews took place on 12, 14 and 26 April 2022 respectively. They can be found in another text: Success Story: Narratives of Lublin Assistance to Refugees from Ukraine.

The Power of Narrative

Originally, those talks were intended to be only a source of information and quotes for this article, but I have noticed that such vivid accounts in some ways organise the content better than the author’s text and are therefore worth publishing in full. The narrative form allows us to get a better feel for the motivations of the people who played a key role in this process, and preserves the multitude of important connections between different pieces of information. Above all, however, it helps us to imagine ourselves in similar situations. In a word, it is material for self-motivated mental training, the same kind that athletes undergo and that ordinary people experience involuntarily when they read stories about heroes they wish to be like.

On the other hand, one will find little ready-made know-how knowledge in these accounts on how to organise oneself or mass humanitarian aid in extraordinary circumstances. It is between the lines. For example, my interviewees did not directly mention social capital, but instead described it through people’s actions. These accounts help to understand how social capital works, but in order to see its mechanisms one must be surprised and intrigued by them to an extent that provokes a desire to analyse their point. And this is what reading the aforementioned accounts primarily serves to do.

Simplifying, what emerges from those descriptions is a picture of something like an ant colony, a flock of birds or a swarm of bees. These animals, guided by very simple rules, are able to behave collectively as if they were doing so according to some common thought. We admire them for this, because similar behaviour for the common good is not common among humans, but this is exactly how the local communities helping the refugees from Ukraine acted.

Without any external coordination, they themselves set about solving a problem that could not be solved by the appointed authorities or formal bodies. The collective wisdom generated and immediately implemented some mysterious algorithms that the professionals did not know or could not even think of.

A Fluid Pyramid

The individual actors in these activities (residents, NGOs, companies, offices, institutions) can be imagined as a cloud of dispersed possibilities residing in society. Each of them separately was small, but together they formed a great power. And this is perhaps the simplest definition of social capital: the ability to join forces for a common purpose. My interviewees also mention situations where this capacity was lacking. This ability can be imagined as the “software” that allows all the resources diffused in the social “cloud” to come into play. In Lublin it was based on three key principles.

The first one was minimal transaction costs, or instant readiness for collaboration based on trust. As they say, “one phone call was enough” to get things done. “We knew we were working on a high level of trust and nothing bad could happen”, as Rafal “Koza” Kozinski put it.

The second principle was heterarchy, i.e. acting without hierarchy or on the basis of transience of power. Depending on which solution seemed most effective at the time, individual actors acted independently, complementing each other, creating common rules or adapting to someone else’s rules, regardless of who held what position in which hierarchy. The priority criterion for organisation was efficiency rather than formal status.

As a result, the Lublin Social Committee to Aid Ukraine, in addition to the people and entities giving it a “face”, could include many other organisations and individuals who acted autonomously in their own areas, but at the same time synergistically with the other partners within the Committee. It was an open structure whose elements were defined by the intensity of communication and the issues dealt with at the moment rather than by rigid rules of procedure. Power relations were fluid and subordinated to pragmatics rather than to rank.

The third rule concerns the determination to be active for the common good and will be discussed in more detail below. The important point here is that this is an individual feature and its distribution in the society complies with the classical Gauss curve: the stronger it is, the fewer people have it. This gives the community a pyramid shape, which is very difficult to accept for people and offices that consider the principle of social equality to be absolute and apply it, as it were, mechanically. It is undoubtedly necessary to give everyone equal chances and opportunities, but in some situations it will be better for everyone if more of them are given to those few who make better use of them for the common good.

By the way, such “less numerous” people are more active in social participation. They appear more frequently than others at public consultation meetings and therefore are called “same faces over and over again” by administration. Offices often underestimate their involvement, failing to understand that it is impossible to create, on a mass scale, a permanent motivation among residents to spend their leisure time on consultations, because this is a feature of only a tiny fraction of the population.

Fortunately, after the outbreak of war, it was noticed that those “less numerous” who get involved should be recognised and at least not hindered. If the principle of equal treatment of all humanitarian aid initiatives had been applied by, say, the Sanitary Service or the Police, eventually refugees would have had to live in camps. Where, paradoxically, these services would have had a lot more work to do. The fluid pyramid principle is therefore intuitively understood, but rather only in such exceptional situations as humanitarian aid to Ukraine, and even then not always, as mentioned by my interviewees from the Liliowa 5 centre.

An Organic Network

The structure of this cross-sectoral cooperation grew organically rather than by following any preconceived plan. Its successive elements joined the system after identifying a problem they could help to solve. Everyone did what they could, what they knew their way around and what was most important at the time. Organisations and individuals successively joined the system like a chain of resource buffers to keep the whole system running. Sometimes they did favours to one another which were seemingly insignificant for the functioning of the whole system, such as the involvement of grandparents or even neighbours in looking after the children of parents who were busy organising aid. This was the case with the Liliowa 5 centre. In order to be effective, many people had to “disengage” from their families for a while. Without the acceptance of their relatives, this would have been impossible.

Such unknown background heroes, acted everywhere. Their support was critical especially for the small group of people who engaged maximally to accumulate the generosity of a large group of people engaging minimally. This created a natural system of crowdfunding in which even small individual donations of time, labour and material resources counted. This is how every tree and ecosystem in general works. In order for us to be able to eat an apple pie, somewhere in the ground millions of root hairs and strands of mycorrhizal fungi must supply the tree from the soil with the micrograms of substances needed to develop a kilogram of apples.

The first humanitarian response in the Lublin Social Committee to Aid Ukraine was spontaneous and voluntary but it soon ran out of energy, which is completely understandable. Then, as Rafal “Koza” Kozinski pointed out, the next step was the unlimited work of officials and employees of the institution that took over. For Liliowa 5, it was the work of Olga, Łukasz and Marcin, who also used their professional competences. The endowment capital of such people’s commitment laid basis for broadening and stabilising the involvement of other people and organisations in joint assistance. Of course, all this was happening at the same time, but it is useful to distinguish such functional stages in order to understand why it produced results and did not end in chaos.

Amateurs’ Professional Behaviour

The Committee’s key staff not only enabled others to join in and set an example of professionalism and dedication to all, but also made everyone feel a vital part of a common, well-functioning machine.

This is the basis of so-called “turquoise management”, in which the degree of awareness of organisational management is decentralised and equal among all members of the organisation. This model explains what it means to work “on trust” and where the aforementioned heterarchical instinct comes from. This is because what is needed for “turquoise” cooperation is not so much leaders as people who are able to put away their egos, to cooperate without strife and rivalry, to lead in some circumstances and give way to others when a situation changes. In addition to trust already mentioned, this also requires an awareness that sometimes you are the creator and maker of success by doing something, and at other times by not getting in the way of others doing the work.

In the Lublin community, among people not organised in any structures, this situation was repeated on smaller scales and was more dynamic. There were constantly some temporary decision-making hubs between people, hubs directing the flow of information or single impulses linking loose initiatives of individuals into ad hoc teams. These formed spontaneously and temporarily into stable support centres, from which other dispersed initiatives benefited.

It would be a truism to dwell on the usefulness of social media in these processes, as described in detail by Marcin from Liliowa 5. However, it is worth noting that, thanks to them, chains of helping hands, connected with trust in one another, produced chains of “security certificates”, reminiscent of blockchains, that secured the reliability and correctness of the flow of refugees between successive locations or points of procedure.

Looking from another angle, some manifestations of organisational wisdom mentioned by my interlocutors resemble methods used in modern armies. Decision-making competences in the implementation of the overall plan had been decentralised and shifted as low as possible to operational units supported by a vigilant information network. This is how NATO’s methods of warfare work, and this is how the Ukrainian army won the first stage of war with the Russian army. It is a slightly different incarnation of turquoise management.

The military methods of organisation also include the simple principle of “be ready and wait” according to which the employees of the Cultural Centre behaved. Not always does it mean wasting time. The so called lean management, in which everything is organised exactly on time, is not possible in unpredictable conditions. Therefore sometimes they did nothing but were at the disposal of the Homo Faber people. After all, not everything can always be organised in advance and this fact has to be accepted. It will take time for lean management procedures to emerge, i.e. when everything starts to run on its own like clockwork, at minimal cost.

Ultimately, the whole system evolved to just such a state thanks to the intuitive application of two other related principles of modern management: kaizen and nofault approach to correcting mistakes. The first refers to improving production in small steps by removing the causes of any defects on an ongoing basis and by implementing rationalisation concepts. This system, invented in the USA during the Second World War, was later adopted from American experts in Japan and popularised by Toyota.

The second principle is used, among other things, to improve the quality of health care services and it involves the implementation of medical insurance regardless of who was responsible for the unfortunate event. This may facilitate better identification and systemic removal of its causes because less energy is spent on liquidating the consequences of mistakes. By applying these two rules, the system was constantly updating itself, informing all its parts of changes being made, new conditions, the disappearance of existing opportunities and the emergence of new ones.

Volunteering for Responsibility

Practices such as overtime work without extra pay, supporting volunteers with per diems and even transitioning them to contracts show a very different image of volunteering than the black and white one we are used to. It turns out that it is possible to be a full-time employee and a volunteer at the same time, or be a volunteer and get paid at the same time. If one wanted to organise this according to some bureaucratic rules, the aid system would fall apart.

The real content of such voluntary service is not unpaid work but unsolicited though very much needed responsibility without a boss. It is about taking over responsibility for the common good when there is no one to take care of it, and discharging this responsibility sometimes in one’s own free time, sometimes as part of one’s duties, depending on individual situation. The opposite of this kind of volunteering after 24 February 2022 would be the refusal to take any new commitments, but continuing with existing tasks and lifestyles, which, incidentally, also had its justification in terms of the wellbeing of society.

A concrete example of “responsibility volunteering” in humanitarian aid to refugees was people who themselves no longer had available accommodation, but who did not refuse to help those in need, and took responsibility for finding them additional accommodation elswhere. Olga called this “out-of-housing service”. There is similar thing in business called out-of-warehouse trading or dropshipping. But it could just as well be considered that such people took on the role of volunteer traffic dispatchers, directing refugees to “vacant tracks” in a cloud of social housing stock.

This kind of volunteering also functions in peacetime by the name of civic, urban or community activism, city movement or self-advocacy. It appears wherever there is a lack of “ownership” of some process of change for the better. This is when people see that it is necessary to pick up the slack.

Sometimes such an civic activity becomes an object of ridicule and criticism from other citizens. Ultimately, this is understandable, but why is it so often frowned upon by democratic authorities? After all, it is a form of fulfilling the highest human needs, which include self-fulfilment by doing something for others. There are people who have such needs. Our country and each of its municipalities and cities should help to meet them, because these are needs at the top of the pyramid of social commitment mentioned above.

The Moral Imperative

The voluntarism of responsibility is closely linked to this third rule, through which the grassroots system of helping Ukrainian refugees was able to emerge. This rule is about shared values, but not in the sense that one verbally invokes them. It is about such a sense of values that gives one no choice but to react in accordance with these values, and therefore to reject other actions. This is how the Homo Faber association initiated social aid for Ukraine in Lublin. They were on a train to Warsaw when the first Russian missils stroke around 4am and a just got off the train to buy return tickets while at the same time calling friends in Lublin to prepare for the first refugees who were already on their way to the city from the east.

The moral imperative is not a reaction like, “This is very important, but…”. It is a reaction that is literally immediate and automatic like a moral Pavlovian reflex. In the above case of Homo Faber members it was made possible by the fact that they had always been close to these issues and above all had recently returned from the Polish-Belarussian border where they helped immigrants pushed by Belarussians to Poland. Therefore, they literally experienced first-hand what it is like to be a refugee: in the woods, in the dark, in the cold, without any prospects.

In Polish there is a different idiom for the English phrases “the hard way” and “first-hand experience”: to experience something “on one’s own skin”. It shows deeper meaning here, which neuroscience explains. Our brain is connected to our skin, senses, muscles and all other organs. Therefore, we learn with our whole body. Our whole body participates in the realisation of ideas known from thoughts and words. Someone who has experienced the fate of the people they want to help will react very differently to someone who only knows that as a theoretical topic.

In this context, the pleasure of helping others, which my interviewees mentioned, will be easier to understand. It may raise doubts about the altruism of their motives but there is no contradiction between altruism and personal satisfaction. Satisfaction from achieving a goal is the normal result of purposeful action. It helped thousands of people after the outbreak of war to react just as promptly. Marcin from Liliowa 5 pointed out that at some point there was even a “fashion” for helping but it is just another name for social solidarity. It can be imagined as a kind of exothermic reaction generating warmth between people.

Effective action is inconceivable without enjoyment of the results. On the contrary, the greater the pleasure of action, the more effective it is. We would all wish, for example, that civil servants and politicians performed their public functions with similar joy, enjoying our happiness as the citizens they serve.

A true moral imperative triggers a quick instinctive reaction like an unconditioned reflex, but it also reorganises the entire hierarchy of values, influencing conscious decisions that require thinking. This allowed Homo Faber to discard previous disputes and animosities with local authorities in the name of a higher need. This is simple in theory, but often requires an inner breakthrough, which always takes time, and may as well not happen at all.

After all, from our own experience and from history, we know plenty of cases where, despite declarations of common values, antagonism and private interests prevailed. The fact that we did help the refugees has shown us that it is possible to achieve tangible results not by knowing the methods, but by recognising that certain actions are necessary. Objective circumstances have shown how effective man can be in doing good when he has no choice.

Social Compound Interest

However, this effect cannot be achieved with a one-off “investment in oneself”. The qualities needed for this are not innate. In order to react in this way, one has to take many small steps for a long time and far in advance of the need to react as desired in the moment of trial. This was alluded to by Piotr Skrzypczak, who said that it was possible to apply Lublin’s humanitarian solutions elsewhere, but to do so one would have to “go back in time”. It is because those solutions depend on social capital, and in turn its development depends on our previous consistent actions, which create that capital only with time.

In terms of building capacity to help refugees in Lublin, such activities included numerous cultural projects related to Ukraine and the very presence of Ukrainian students or workers in the public space. This familiarised us with the very existence of a local national minority, to which, after all, we were not at all accustomed since the border changes and repatriations after the Second World War. A similar path, but in their private lives, was followed by Olga, Lukasz and Marcin from Liliowa 5.

The point is, that such activities need to be done for reasons other than those which later require us to intervene seriously. In Lublin such activities have been conducted for example by “Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre” Centre, which for over a quarter of a century has been restoring the public memory of the pre-war Jewish community, which made up one third of Lublin population. The Centre began in the 1990s with the programme “Meetings of Cultures”, which was then a very unconventional approach to opening up Polish borders after 1989. Most people were interested in going abroad to work or to do shopping.

A dozen years later, an important episode in building cross-sectoral integration happened, namely Lublin’s bid for the 2016 European Capital of Culture title and the subsequent long-standing cooperation between institutions, NGOs, offices and residents. In short, to build social capital, in intercultural and cross-sectoral dimensions alike, we should act according to the evangelical principle of being faithful to values in small matters in order to achieve a tangible result in large ones.

It is very much like investing on a compound interest basis. It is enough to make every day a small effort consisting, for example, in accepting a neighbour of a different nationality, so that one day in the future we will be able save his life when it requires more serious sacrifices. This principle applies not only to foreigners, but to all groups at risk of discrimination or dislike from our side, including the neighbour from behind the fence, as described in the classical Polish comedy “Sami swoi” [“All Friends Here”].

The role of culture and its animators in such processes cannot be overestimated because they provide a pretext for the development of positive intercultural and interpersonal relations in conditions of peace and affluence. It is pleasant to help someone with whom we have pleasant memories. Let’s “buy” shares of good relations while they are cheap.

Social Capital as a Political One

Social capital does not need all this meta-knowledge to work, but it certainly needs it from public figures who, through their influence on society, develop or destroy social relations. Politicians destroy them when they use the principle of “divide and rule” and turn their own voters against supporters of their rivals. By doing so, they seek to reduce transaction costs, but only within a closed circle of their fans, which is all the more internally integrated the more hostile it is towards other circles. Although it is detrimental to social capital in the whole of society, paradoxically they do it out of a need to create social capital but at their own disposal.

It is a primitive, short-term strategy to deal with vested interests. It will not work in solving serious problems affecting entire local communities or the country as a whole, because literally everyone with their resources is needed for that, not just those we particularly like. The local reduction of transaction costs in just one group comes at the expense of increasing them between groups. This often creates a very stable arrangement that is difficult to change, as exemplified by the recent colonisation of democratic societies by political parties. When this happens, it is in vain to call “all hands on deck” if the ship is sinking, because only supporters will show up. And what if in a critical situations, it turns out that we have a fishing rod, but our hated neighbour has a bait worm?

In Lublin, fortunately, this was avoided, thanks to the aforementioned intellectual implications of the moral imperative. As Piotr Skrzypczak said openly: “There are always some complicated subjects and thorny issues between authorities and community organisations. We put ours aside to take care of what is most important”. The friendly relations between the mayor of Lublin city, Krzysztof Żuk and the voivode (a rough equivalent of governor) of Lublin Province, Lech Sprawka, who represented opposing political parties, should be also considered equally fortunate circumstances.

However, without the organisational flexibility and ingenuity of non-governmental organisations and ordinary people like Olga, Łukasz, and Marcin from Liliowa 5, the situation would be much more difficult for local officials due to the rapid influx of refugees.

After all, the administration was created by definition to govern the existing state of affairs and not to invent new rules of conduct, not to work out as the crew of a sailing ship during a storm. Lublin’s social capital has made it possible for competent people and organisations to join the action.

Manifestation of Social Capital

After February 24, 2022, we experienced a “revelation” of social capital comparable only to the events between August 1980 and December 1981 connected with the rise of Independent Self-Governing Trade Union “Solidarity” [“Solidarność”]. In those years most Polish women and men for the first time in their lives had the opportunity to observe on such a scale and with their own eyes that social capital brings tangible benefits and what mechanisms stand behind it.

In 2022 we could again find out that soft skills sometimes turn out to be the hardest ones and experience what many years of work of culture and social animators are useful for. Previously, social capital was rather an abstraction than reality, but war foregrounded it like a lens. However, it will become only a theoretical concept once again if we simply don’t believe in its revelation.

Social capital is effective. Perhaps this is a good time to think about creating a national or local social capital development program using our experience of humanitarian aid to Ukraine?

Thanks to the fact that the situation has become temporarily stable, now we can take some time to analyse our actions in terms of previous circumstances that induced them and perhaps invest some money in creating intentionally similar circumstances for the security for future generations.

The original version of the article in Polish:

„Jak kapitał społeczny Lublina wypłacił dywidendę uchodźcom z Ukrainy” 

Translation realised as part of student internship (90 hours, October – February 2022-23) in the second year of Applied Linguistics (Faculty of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, UMCS) at the „Grodzka Gate – NN Theater” Center under the direction of Marcin Skrzypek.

Translation: Wiktoria Nowak, Beata Zielonka, Michalina Żydek, Marcin Skrzypek
Contact to the author: marcin@tnn.lublin.pl

Kultura Enter 2023/24
nr 108-109