JOHNSON CITY – (April 11, 2022) Just two months ago, Yaroslav (Yaro) Hnatusko, an MBA student and graduate assistant at East Tennessee State University, was visiting his family and friends in Ukraine, the country of his birth. Everything was peaceful at the time. “Now,” he said, “it’s a war zone in my back yard.” His loved ones and fellow Ukrainians are fighting for their lives – and to help each other – during the invasion by Russia.
Yaro is working with his brother, Stan, to help coordinate a relief effort spearheaded by Stan’s employer, Atlant, Ukraine’s largest distributor of wholesale building materials. The company has converted its warehouses into shelters and food banks for homeless and displaced civilians, while its corporate restaurant is providing free meals by the thousands every day to victims of the war.
It takes about $10,800 per day to meet the needs of those at Atlant’s shelter and in the greater community. Yaro and Stan have set up a GoFundMe site to raise money and keep the food and medicine coming.
“The company’s generation of revenue has stopped,” explains the campaign’s GoFundMe page. “All other food supplies in the city are exhausted. Today and yesterday, we delivered extra food supplies to two orphanages. The last one hadn’t had food in three days.”
“My heart hurts even more to see how many people are not able to get help or even have a meal once a day,” Yaro said. “My brother and I wholeheartedly ask Tennesseans to help us fund the shelter operations for the people who were impacted by heavy fire. They cannot leave, but we can come.”
Yaro has been using his personal Facebook page to share the stories of the shelter and its civilian residents. As Yaro reported in a March 22 post, the shelter prepared and delivered 3,080 meals that day alone in addition to feeding its residents. Meanwhile, volunteers are working to expand the shelter to house an additional 100 people.
“Their work doesn’t stop here,” Yaro added. “They are also taking care of having enough food for the people outside of our shelter who can’t come — policemen, firefighters, doctors and soldiers. All of our volunteers are unpaid. They do it for people because their families are what they have left. They will never have another family.”
###