‘Even a single action matters’

Black-and-white photograph of a fire truck outside a building with a person standing nearby.

In Pavlohrad, a city in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, Oksana Horova has spent decades proving that change can start with one person – and with one decision to take responsibility.

Oksana has been involved in civic work for almost 30 years. In 2011, she became the head of the apartment owners’ association of her five-storey building. What began with improving her own home soon grew into helping other residents create and manage their own homeowners’ associations. The results speak for themselves: in 2015, Pavlohrad had around 100 apartment owners’ associations; today, there are more than 400.

As the work expanded, Oksana and her team established the NGO Resource Centre – Epicentre of Change, broadening their focus from energy efficiency to education, community development, and social support.

When Russia’s full-scale invasion began, this network became a source of support for people fleeing the war. Pavlohrad became an important transit point for people from communities in Donetsk Oblast, while thousands of internally displaced people came to live in the city. Oksana’s team helped them find accommodation and deal with urgent needs.

As the war changed the needs of the community, Oksana increasingly focused on safety. Through the project “New Technologies for Life Safety,” supported by the United Nations Development Programme and the Government of Denmark, her team works with the State Emergency Service to strengthen local rescuers, improve training, raise public awareness of safety rules, and make emergency services more resilient.

Oksana’s approach is to start with the people who know the problem best.

“We don’t start by deciding what equipment to buy,” she explains. “We ask the rescuers what they want to achieve. Then we work backwards: what do they need to make that happen?”

That approach has led to practical solutions, from equipment for rescue operations, to a solar power system that keeps the local emergency dispatch centre running during blackouts. So seamlessly does the new system operate, on one occasion rescuers only realised the electricity was out when residents started calling to ask when it would return.

But for Oksana, equipment is only part of the solution.

“Together with the hard projects, there must always be a soft component,” she says. “It’s not enough for people to receive resources – they have to be taught how to use them and carry that knowledge forward.”

Her larger goal is to strengthen civil society in Pavlohrad by helping people, organizations, and local institutions work together, determine their own needs, and find solutions. She believes this capacity will become even more important after the war, when the immediate challenges are fewer and the community can focus more fully on development.

For her, it all comes back to the same belief that has guided her work for years:

“People think: If I do this – what difference will it make?” she says. “But it does make a difference. If you want to make changes, you’ll always find a way.”