Lesia Kalenychenko has been with the YMCA for 5 years and is currently the president of YMCA Boyarka. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, their local organization has become even more focused on volunteering for the country and humanitarian aid. In the late fall of 2022, the volunteers of YMCA Boyarka began to gather for trench candle workshops every Sunday.

For me personally, trench candle workshops are an opportunity to feel that I am helping. I can’t be a soldier, I can’t protect my house from rockets, but I can make a trench candle that will warm my classmate who is serving in the army. – Lesia admits.

Over the past two years, the volunteers of YMCA Boyarka have made more than 4000 candles (!) These trench candles help soldiers on frontlines to warm up and to cook some meal, in different regions of Ukraine. it’s Kharkiv, Lugansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions. basically, everywhere, where’s active combat missions happening.

Thanks to those workshops, we were not only helping Ukrainian defenders, but also we met and invited to YMCA highly motivated young people. they wanted to do something, they wanted to help their country, they wanted to have a community with same values. and here’s when YMCA Boyarka stepped in. We became such community and such space for them, and those teens, who were just attending our workshops’ year ago, now they are active leaders in our YMCA and even on national level too!

I’m so proud of our young people! it’s unfair that instead of spending their youth, exploring the beauty of this world, they have to waste their youth saving this world. I know that all this is so difficult for them. but they are so strong! I see them every Sunday, I see that our YMCA community helps them and gives them opportunity to be honest, responsible, caring and respectful for each other, for themselves and for what they do. and I’m happy to be in YMCA, because I get to meet such brilliant young people. It gives me hope.

Read also about Stas Krymchuk and his realization after humanitarian missions to frontline comunities.