Community resilience practices: the social dimension, perspectives, risks, vulnerabilities, and support capacity

This report is a part of the activities of the National Platform for Resilience and Social Cohesion (National Platform).

This civic initiative was launched in February 2018 (formerly known as the National Platform ‘Dialogue on Peace and Secure Reintegration’). The National Platform’s activities are geared towards strengthening Ukraine’s national resilience. This could be achieved by establishing dialogue practices in society, providing authorities with proposals for developing relevant policies, particularly those on resilience and social cohesion, and ensuring public awareness of these processes. The initiative has been implemented with financial support from the European Union as part of the Sustaining Ukrainian Resilience and European Security through Dialogue project.

The report is based on findings from facilitated cohesion dialogues held in Chernihiv, Lviv, Chernivtsi, Vinnytsia, Zakarpattia, Dnipropetrovsk, Mykolaiv, and Kharkiv in March 2026. The material outlines general trends and contentious issues in the context of potential options for a peace settlement, and identifies the conditions under which a possible settlement might become socially acceptable, politically legitimate and capable of contributing to stabilisation.

UCIPR expresses its gratitude to all participants for the open exchange of views.

The report is drafted by Julia Tyschenko, co-founder of the National Platform for Resilience and Social Cohesion.

KEY FINDINGS

Community resilience was preserved in all areas covered by the analysis but relied primarily on social adaptation rather than a coherent institutional response. It was supported by horizontal ties, volunteering, civil society organisations, donor assistance, and the high personal engagement of individuals.

A transitional form of resilience was becoming a common pattern across the areas covered by the analysis. Communities were still maintaining everyday stability, but increasingly at the cost of depleting human, organisational, and psychological resources.

The greatest shared vulnerability was not the limited availability of resources, but inequality and lack of transparency in access to them. Inadequate reasoning behind decisions, overloaded procedures, and reliance on informal contacts shaped a sense of unfairness.

Housing was most often mentioned as a social problem. Its impact extended beyond IDPs to young families, veterans, people in vulnerable situations, and, more broadly, households’ ability to plan for the future.

Social tension in most areas remained latent but had the potential to escalate. The most sensitive issues were competition among different social groups for access to resources, tensions between frontline and rear-area experiences, the mobilisation context, the distribution of assistance, and moral and psychological fatigue.

IDP integration remained uneven in most areas and depended largely on housing, employment, and the stability of local support. In the absence of long-term solutions, it often took on features of temporariness or parallel coexistence of social groups.

Veteran policy was one of the key tests of communities’ maturity in the near term. The main challenge was the readiness of communities, services, and employers for the return of military personnel, rather than merely the existence of formal support programmes.

Accessibility emerged in all areas as an indicator of a community’s overall governance capacity. The formal existence of solutions often did not mean real access to healthcare, transport, administrative services, education, and the everyday urban environment.

Civil society organisations and volunteer networks remained critically important pillars of resilience but could no longer substitute for systemic policy. Further shifting the functions of the state and local authorities onto them intensified the exhaustion of active community actors.

All areas demonstrated the need to move from maintaining stability situationally to institutionally structured resilience. This meant transparent rules, better service coordination, sensitive social policy, and sustainable mechanisms of dialogue between the authorities and social groups.

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