Tamara Borysova, Coordinator of the Coalition of Social Service Providers
At the end of September, I was fortunate to attend the Legal Reform Forum held by the Centre for Democracy and Rule of Law (CEDEM). It is a forum where you can talk about legal changes aimed at developing civil society in Ukraine. And talk we did — lively, often running over time, drawing on the real experience of people and organisations who work in Ukraine every day during the war and bring victory closer.
The words of the head of the Coalition of Social Service Providers, Hanna Kotenko, stuck in my memory. She spoke about how small patient and parent organisations that provide social services today have to run just to stay afloat. I sat in the hall and thought: this is about all of us. A municipal institution receives funding every year. An organisation that helps the same people has to prove, time and again, that it deserves support. The forum covered many things, but for me this voice was one of the most important, because behind it stands the daily experience of dozens of organisations.
Those words stayed with me. Because the inequality Hanna spoke about is very concrete: state and non-state providers work under different conditions.
Municipal institutions receive budget funding to sustain their work and their network. Small civic organisations, meanwhile, often have to keep searching for limited resources, prove their capacity, and spend a lot of energy overcoming bureaucratic obstacles. A municipal institution knows it will exist next year. A small organisation does not know this, and it spends a lot of resources precisely on keeping services running for people.
It seems to me that we often end up cast as competitors to municipal institutions. But in reality we have nothing to divide. A person in crisis does not care who helped them; what matters to them is that the help came in time.
The state still often sees non-state providers as competitors to municipal institutions rather than as equal partners.
I believe this is the wrong approach. We should not be competing over who will «help better» a person in crisis. The state must create conditions in which a person receives quality help wherever it can best be provided.
Civic organisations often work where the system cannot cope. They see people's real needs, respond quickly to change, and find solutions for specific situations. Yet it is the small organisations that have the fewest resources to take part in law-making, prepare legal proposals, or sustain long-term advocacy.
There is another problem — analytical invisibility
The experience of one organisation or community can be seen as an isolated case. But when we collect dozens or hundreds of such stories, it becomes clear that they often point to systemic problems in legislation or in how it is applied.
That is why, for me, the SSP Coalition is not about «uniting for the sake of uniting». It is about making sure that the experience of people on both sides of a social service finally reaches those who design and adopt the rules.
It is a practical mechanism that helps turn the experience of those who work directly with people into systemic change.
We work in at least three important directions
The first direction — a shared resource
Large, experienced organisations can share legal knowledge and experience with smaller organisations that have direct contact with people.
The second direction — turning practice into analysis
We collect local cases and providers' experience and frame them as systemic legal proposals. This allows us to talk to the state not only about individual problems but also about patterns that need to change.
The third direction — creating a level playing field in the social services market
We promote the idea of effective social commissioning, in which the state purchases a quality service for a specific person rather than simply funding infrastructure.
Laws, budgets, procedures: these are all just tools. The question is always the same: did the person receive help when they needed it?
The experience of non-state social service providers must be taken into account in legal and policy discussions. If this experience does not reach those who make the rules, reforms may remain detached from real life.
We are joining forces so that the voice of every provider is heard where decisions are made. And I invite organisations that work with people every day and want to shape what Ukraine's social service system will look like to join the Coalition.
If you are a non-state social service provider with practical experience and want that experience to be taken into account when legislation and public policy are shaped — join the Coalition. Together we can do what a single organisation often cannot: pool experience, amplify each other's voices, and achieve systemic change.
You can join the Coalition on the website: coalitionssp.com.ua