Every autumn, I gaze up at the sky with sadness when I hear the cranes’ calls high above our house as they gather and migrate south to their winter quarters. I call after them in amazement: “Arrive safely, and above all, come back!”
Five months later, their return will herald the long-awaited arrival of spring. I will look up at them and welcome them with joy and gratitude.
But this year, many of the migratory birds won’t even make it on the journey mapped out for at least 50,000 years. They’re so weakened by avian influenza that they can’t overcome Earth’s gravity. Some simply fall from the sky. Worse still, many that do will continue to spread the virus.
Here, it’s the birds that fall from the sky, these majestic, weightless, organized animals that call to one another, form up, and follow their navigational instincts.
Elsewhere, it’s the drones that form up and monitor, the bombs that drop and spread the virus of destruction.
It’s easy to become discouraged, if it weren’t for the hope that the animals would become resistant, that a fragile ceasefire would stop the deaths, that people would find their voice and the courage to resist war and dictatorship.
“Hope dies last,” they say. I never want to experience that. “Hope is a weapon,” says poet and activist Robert Arnold from Arkansas, whose video the YouTube algorithm suggests to me. The great American poet Emily Dickinson, on the other hand, wrote, “Hope is the thing with feathers…”
So hope seems strong and deeply human, resilient and yet so fragile at the same time.
In order to counter my own increasing and wave-like despondency and hopelessness, because people don’t seem to learn and continue to follow charlatans, because the “Silent Spring” that Rachel Carson described 62 years ago in her book of the same name could still become reality with a spring without birdsong, I search for a recipe on how to nourish hope, every day.
The American Psychological Association describes hope as a learnable skill because, unlike optimism, it is action-oriented. Dr. Chan Hellman, professor of psychology and founding director of the Hope Research Center at the University of Oklahoma, says: “We often use the word ‘hope’ in place of wishing, like you hope it rains today or you hope someone’s well. . . But wishing is passive toward a goal, and hope is about taking action toward it.”
One person who actually practices “active hope” is Iryna Drobovych, co-founder of the Foundation ‘The Day After’ in Ukraine.
The ‘The Day After’ Foundation is a Ukrainian nonprofit promoting women’s leadership and meaningful participation in the processes of strengthening national unity and preparing to build just and sustainable peace following the war in Ukraine. Iryna is also a National Consultant on women’s leadership and political participation at the UN Women Ukraine. Previously, she served as a CEO and Strategy Director at the Ukrainian Women’s Congress (2019-2023), as a Government Relations Advisor with the Kyiv Security Forum and Open Ukraine Foundation (2016-2019) and as an Executive Assistant to the Prime Minister of Ukraine (2014-2016).
I met Iryna at the Salzburg Global American Studies session in September. She deeply impressed me with her openness and enthusiasm about the work she and her colleagues are engaging in during wartimes. I told her back then that I wanted to interview her about “hope.” “Hope is courage, don’t you forget it,” she answered, and “We fight so you don’t have to.”
I had to think about these sentences for a while, especially since many of us complain about so many mundane things in our everyday lives. And yet, we get to enjoy the normalcy of, say, heated houses, electricity on demand, dinners in our favorite Pizza place, secure incomes or at least a social safety net that provides for basic needs, and safe Sunday walks with the family. After brooding over the topic for weeks, I reached out to Iryna and asked for a written interview.
MK: Iryna, your little son spent his first day of school in an air raid shelter. What was that like for him? How did you feel about taking him there?
Iryna: Indeed, Ukrainian children started their school year in the shelters and my son Darii was one of them. That is the reality we all here have been living through for more than three years since Russia started the large-scaled attack against Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Within these years, the Ukrainian educational system has adapted to this challenging security environment – all schools have arranged shelters and continue classes in case air alarm goes off during the day. Moreover, in the frontline regions with almost non-stop security alerts, the schools are already working in shelters or even in the underground in the big cities ensuring secure conditions for children.
Back in 2022, I well explained to my son the way he should react to air alarm. Surprisingly, this knowledge became useful even in Minneapolis, where I spent a year back in 2023-2024 on a Humphrey Fellowship, and my son joined me there. Each first Tuesday of the month, there is a tornado training air alarm for the community to be informed how to react to an emergency. The sound of this alarm is the same as air alarm in Ukraine. Upon hearing that sound in Minneapolis, my then 5-years old son started asking me about shelters and encouraged me to go there. In that moment, I realized that he understands danger well and knows how to react.
Thus, today, I feel fine while taking my son to school here in Kyiv. Teachers and school principal are strictly following security protocols and have equipped the school shelter in the way children could enjoy their time while waiting for security to be back. Here in Ukraine, we often have blackouts and the shelter also has emergency lights. Together with his friends, Darii is playing games during the breaks and is following teachers’ advice in his classes, even in the shelter. The war has stolen a lot from Ukrainian kids, but we as parents and caregivers try to do our best to making their childhoods filled with joy and happiness – for their own good and despite all the challenges.
MK: The Foundation ‘The Day After’ you co-founded is, as the name suggests, future-oriented. It aims to pave the way for a peaceful, just, and united Ukraine, focusing on women who accompany and shape this path. Tell us about your work.
Iryna: The Foundation ‘The Day After’ is a Ukrainian nonprofit established in fall 2024 in Kyiv. I thought about setting up such a foundation while I was a Visiting Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace in spring 2024. I’m happy that my colleagues supported it. Our key goal is to prepare Ukrainian women to meaningfully participate in all decision-making processes for building a just and sustainable peace following the war in Ukraine.
To reach this goal, we organize study visits for Ukrainian women activists to countries that have gone through major conflicts and mass atrocities. During these visits, we establish connections with the women’s organizations there. We share experiences and enrich our knowledge in post-conflict settlement. In 2024, we conducted study visits to four countries – Rwanda, South Africa, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and later Kosovo. We learned a lot about sustainable grassroots women’s networks, supporting vulnerable groups, including survivors of conflict-related sexual violence, mental health support and trauma healing, post-war community development and women’s political participation in post-conflict societies.
We applied this knowledge to the Ukrainian context and developed a training manual on peacebuilding and peace processes. In 2024, we conducted the respective trainings for around 100 Ukrainian women activists from different regions. In 2025, we are continuing our educational work for grassroot women in six Ukrainian frontline regions.
Also, we advocate nationally and internationally for women’s meaningful participation in all decision-making processes both in war times and in post-war recovery. We develop policy recommendations. Most recently we’ve briefed the national authorities on supporting women’s organizations in preparing for peace during the national consultations initiated by the Governmental Commissioner on Gender Equality and within the national dialogue on implementing UNSC Resolution 1325 “Women. Peace. Security” initiated by the Ministry of Social Policy, Family and Unity of Ukraine.
MK: What motivated you to work with these traumatized women on a vision of the future?
Iryna: Everyone in Ukraine is traumatized by this exhausting existential war that has dramatically changed the lives of Ukrainians in different regions. Many of us now know what an explosion in the sky looks and sounds like. Several of us have experienced the fear of death, and we all definitely understand that there is no safe space in Ukraine, not in the frontline communities nor in the rear.
Women in Ukraine demonstrate extraordinary leadership and play an important role during this large-scaled war. There are currently 75,000 women in the Armed Forces of Ukraine and around 5,000 of them are on the battle fields executing combat tasks. More than 50% of newly established businesses during the war are run by women boosting Ukraine’s war economy. Women are stepping into the professions that have been traditionally considered male ones, like mine workers, electricians, public transport drivers, truckers, etc. They are working on integrating veterans back into civic life, support remote communities with mobile medial and mental health services, de-mine the just liberated territories and bring new technologies into agriculture.
And yet, women’s leadership roles remain undervalued and often not recognized, both in the communities and nation-wide. At the end of the day, this creates obstacles for women to be included in decision-making processes for the country’s recovery and preparing for peace.
With the ‘The Day After’ Foundation, we would like to counter this challenging trend. During our workshops and trainings with Ukrainian women, we discuss transformative leadership and the roles they could take on based on their war experience, knowledge and skills in order to ensure a just and sustainable peace that will eventually come to our country. We also highlight the importance of social cohesion and strengthening national unity after the war. Today, as the latest polls confirm, up to 70% of Ukrainians are united against the enemy, but at the same time up to 11% of us feel injustice in taking on the burden of the war. Around 20% lament a lack of trust in their communities. These trends could dramatically change as soon as the aggressor ends this war and is punished for the crimes against humanity. Our goal in the Foundation is to make sure women in different regions have efficient tools in working on social cohesion and keeping their communities united for future post-war recovery.
MK: How do you personally nurture hope for a peaceful future after all the destruction and suffering you experience every day? How do you take away your son’s fear and convey to him that life can be safe and carefree, that he, too, can hope for a better future?
Iryna: In my work with Ukrainian female community leaders, I often have tough moments. Especially when we are talking about peace that eventually will come. It is indeed very hard to keep that perspective while people are dying every single day, when ‘superhumans’ – those who’ve lost their arms or legs in the war and now are on prothesis – are together with us pedestrians on the streets, when teenagers clear away the rubble of their recently destroyed house or when a woman who just buried her beloved husband killed in war is giving birth to their child. These conversations bring a lot of frustration.
However, within the activities of the Foundation ‘The Day After’ I have collected several good practices from different parts of the world that help me explain to those women peace step-by-step. And with that to pave the way for them to understand that it is not too early to prepare for peace to ensure better days ahead. When I see how this narrative changes women I’m working with, how it brings relief from their uneasy reflections and how it empowers them to becoming active in their communities, that brings me hope.
I return full of optimism from each field mission. And I share these feeling with my son in my days-off that we always spend together. Then we share absolutely ordinary things – long walks along the riverside, vanilla ice-cream, movie nights or hugs before going to bed. These small moments that are often not noticed while living in peaceful times become a real support in times when war has made your live uncertain, unpredictable and fragile.
MK: The American Psychological Association recommends setting smaller, achievable goals. It emphasizes the importance of becoming part of a community and connecting with like-minded people. What can we learn from you and your colleagues? How can we support your work?
Iryna: Indeed, in a time of huge turbulences that war brought for us, a community of like-minded people provides really important support. Within this year, our Foundation created a community of around 65 Ukrainian mid-career women who live in different regions, work in different areas and have different war experiences. But what they have in common is their huge aspiration to make post-war Ukraine a better place to live. And we support them on this path through networking, via conversations with peace practitioners from all over the world. We create our circle of peace – a safe space for sharing ideas, asking complicated question and learning by doing how to prepare ourselves for another post-war recovery marathon.
And the best support for us is the opportunity to be visible and vocal. Any platform – political, cultural, community or among small interest groups – where the voices of Ukrainian women can be heard and the truth about this war can be told are important for us. Any ideas for sharing experiences with those who like us in Ukraine have gone or are going through conflicts and wars will make our joint voices be heard better globally. And any project that will empower women in meaningful participation for post-war recovery will definitely make our day after in Ukraine a better and happier day.
Thank you, Iryna, for taking the time to share your thoughts with us.
_____________
It is humbling to listen to this brave young woman who manages to instill hope in the traumatized women she works with and who can envision a safe and happy future for her country and her son. To me, she is a point of light.
When we look closely, they are all around us, these points of light, such as
- the 76.1 percent of polled Germans who resent right-wing positions;
- the federal judge in Chicago who exposes the authorities by quoting Carl Sandburg’s poem “Chicago” to illustrate the vitality, diversity and resilience of the “City of the Big Shoulders” that denounces state violence against immigrants;
- the soon-to-be young mayor of New York City who, against all odds and accusations of being a communist, socialist, terrorist, Generalissimo . . . , managed to motivate New Yorkers to go to the polls and vote for change;
- young people in unprecedented numbers protesting in Serbia, Kenya, Peru, Morocco or South Korea against corruption and authoritarianism and dreaming of a more just world.
All these people believe in hope, that powerful and at the same time fragile sentiment, that Emily Dickinson so well describes as “the thing with feathers.
Let’s all keep it airborne.
____________
Notes
Max-Planck Gesellschaft. „Vögel ziehen bei jedem Klima. Zugvögel gab es schon während der letzten Eiszeit“ (18 Februar 2020). https://www.mpg.de/14473814/vogelzug-klima
Original study: Marius Somveille, Martin Wikelski, Robert M. Beyer, Ana S. L. Rodrigues, Andrea Manica, Walter Jetz. „Simulation-based reconstruction of global bird migration over the past 50,000 years.“ Nature Communications (18 February 2020).
Robert Arnold, “Hope is a weapon” (accessed 26 Oct. 2025; posted seven months prior)
https://youtu.be/4CX5xdwkbHg?si=NjgFIzLnhKqlQ-cJ
Emily Dickinson. „Hope is the thing with feathers.“ Poetry Foundation.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42889/hope-is-the-thing-with-feathers-314
Originally titled “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers – (314)”
Copyright Credit: Emily Dickinson, “‘Hope’ is the Thing with Feathers” from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University press, Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Ashley Abramson. “Hope as the antidote. Hope may be the antidote to today’s chaotic world. Here’s how to cultivate it.” American Psychological Association. Vol. 55 No. 1 (created 1 January 2024)
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2024/01/trends-hope-greater-meaning-life
Rachel Carson. Silent Spring. Houghton Mifflin. 27 Sept. 1962.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Spring
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_stumme_Frühling
Carl Sandburg. “Chicago.” Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/12840/chicago
Will Mortenson. “Gen Z protests have spread to seven countries. What do they all have in common?” New Atlanticist (November 6, 2025)
