In March 2022, in response to the full-scale war against Ukraine, Pwrteams' parent company - Nortal, launched a dedicated fund to support the group’s employees in the country and to contribute to local impactful initiatives. Since its inception, Nortal has been allocating resources to the fund each year and in 2024 has committed 100,000 EUR.
Nearly 10,000 EUR were already donated to the SP Charity Fund, co-founded by one of Pwrteams' employees - Ruslan Tereshchenko. To learn more about the fund, it's focus and the main challenges the organisation is currently facing, we had an insightful chat with Ruslan. Read on find out more.
Tell us about yourself. What’s your professional background?
I’m Rus, born in Kyiv, living in Lviv now. 33 years old. Currently, I'm a Solution Architect at TUI’s team at Pwrteams. I was hired back in March 2023 as a Senior Developer, but then my managers proposed to try my skills as an architect and learn from my more seasoned mates. Since then, I’m in charge of changing legacy solutions on our platform and improving it towards higher extent of reliability, maintainability and so on. Becoming an architect was my goal since the time I was a mid-level developer. And now I wish to gain the necessary skills to become a strong one and lead more general solutions, then to become a tech manager of C-level at some point in time. I like entrepreneurship in addition to software engineering and I dream to launch my own software product company someday.
Other than that, and in parallel with my full-time architect role, I founded a small international logistics company that ships goods between Ukraine and the rest of Europe or Turkey. It’s a small business, but I already have a few employees there and it’s a very interesting experience, believe me.
Outside of work, you’re the person behind the SP Charity Fund. What’s its main focus?
Yes, a friend of mine and I founded this charity fund to help our armed forces, veterans, servicemen families, general population and animals who suffer from the hostilities in the country. We’ve set it up to bring our volunteering activities to an official public level, build relations with companies inside and outside of Ukraine and grow our charitable brand. It’s just a necessity right now. We need to defend ourselves, we need to help each other and our defenders.
Through our fund we don’t buy any weapons. We only buy means of protection to satisfy various humanitarian needs. My team and I are really grateful and appreciate the donations of Nortal and Pwrteams for humanitarian purposes.
For more information about the organisation and its campaigns, you can visit our website https://www.support-service.org/. At the moment, it’s in Ukrainian only, but we’re going to also add an English version (the least).
What are the biggest challenges you’re facing with regards to this organisation?
The biggest challenges are time and money. We’ve got enough people in our team to perform all operational work in the fund. We all do it as volunteers besides our main jobs. We adapted and started liking this style of living - our team consists of passionate people, and I really enjoy working with them.
Recently, however, we have been receiving more requests than we can provide charitable assistance to. Therefore, we need to increase our audience of benefactors, including attracting business. And this sometimes takes more time and effort than we would like.
How do you usually raise funds? What are your main sources?
Usually, we utilise the power of social networks, messenger apps and chats, personal connections and work communities. Sometimes we run ads on Facebook, but usually it works well without paid advertisements. We publish announcements on our public channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, Telegram, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram and also republish them in company volunteering chats. The majority of the donations come from individuals now, more rarely from companies.
We supported the SP Charity Fund earlier this year. How was the donation put to use?
Thanks to Nortal and Pwrteams for their support of our fund! We spent the money donated on medical tourniquets, jackets, repairing tools, charging stations (big power banks), gas cartridges for cooking, tablets. The guys that received the supplies were very thankful and happy. We are proud that together we managed to help.
How can others help your NGO?
People who are keen to help could, in fact, do it in various ways - subscribe to our channels, repost our announcements, donate money, buy goods, advertise us and our fundraisings to new audiences and invite their companies to donate like Nortal did.
Learn more about out support in Ukraine here.
