We are currently focusing on helping families survive who have two or more children and are living in a warzone in Ukraine or have escaped from one.
Each family has to submit an application, including a video request, their address, email, phone number, and social media profiles. Our team of Ukrainian volunteers and helpers verifies the authenticity of the application and the family’s location.
Many families also provide additional photos of how the war has affected their life. We see many pictures of homes destroyed by rockets, empty fridges due to a destroyed economy, and sick children with no resources to purchase medicine.
You can see our complete vetting process here: https://gate.org/vetting-process
Currently we do not allow duplicate applications and filter out any that come in.
Currently the limit is $100, which helps a lot in Ukraine.
Most people in Ukraine don’t have the latest generation iPhones and Androids and the videos they submit are the best quality their older phones are able to produce.
Our Ukrainian team of helpers and volunteers works diligently to transcribe, then translate the content for every video submission so you can see the subtitles and understand each family’s story.
Unfortunately, as you can see in the stories shared in the submissions, the humanitarian help is not reaching millions of people in Ukraine. A lot of the humanitarian goods that arrive in Western Ukraine, don’t make it to the South or East, where they are needed most. Additionally, many Ukrainian families are now living in temporarily occupied territories controlled by the Russian army, where it is impossible to deliver humanitarian goods.
Additionally, due to the war, the Ukrainian economy is completely destroyed, with millions of people displaced and suddenly without a job and with no resources.
Our organization does not charge any fees, we transfer all of the donated funds we receive (adjusted for payment processing fees) directly to the families.
Depending on how you send your donation to us, we are charged a payment processing fee. If you’re donating using a credit card, we use Stripe to accept those donations and their payment processing fee for non-profits is ~2.2%. If you are using Zelle, it’s 0%.
We then wire transfer the funds from our bank account in the US to our bank account in Ukraine – the wire transfer fees are waived. From our bank account in Ukraine, we distribute the donations directly to the debit cards of the families (this is the most common way to transfer money in Ukraine) and it’s also free. The funds are converted from USD to UAH at the current bank rate.
Adjusting for payment processing fees, the families receive between $97.8 and $100 (depending on how you send the funds to us) for every $100 donated.
If you would like, you can choose to cover the payment processing fees when filling out the donation form.
We then wire transfer the funds from our bank account in the US to our bank account in Ukraine – the wire transfer fees are waived. From our bank account in Ukraine, we distribute the donations directly to the debit cards of the families (this is the most common way to transfer money in Ukraine) and it’s also free. The funds are converted from USD to UAH at the current bank rate.