The story of Bicester Humanitarian Aid Partnership – or Bicester HAP for short (or “Bee-Hap” for even shorter!) begins with that of our 3 main sister organisations: Swindon HAP (“SHAP”), Democracy Angels, and Bicester Ukrainian Community Support (BUCS). Since the early days of the 2022 invasion, many groups throughout the UK began to send aid to Ukraine – just as many homes within the UK began to take in Ukrainian families, displaced by the war.

The first of these was that of Maya, called on the phone by her cousin on the first day of the war – with the conversation: Get the kids, mother, and mother in law, and get to the Polish border! (But – we’ll come back to Maya and her cousin in a few paragraph’s time!)

In Swindon, the Swindon Humanitarian Aid Partnership (SHAP) was created, and began to set up its team, its delivery network, its communications network to discover exactly what kinds of aid were needed. Soon, it had a board of 9 members, a larger team of newly-arrived Ukrainians, Brits, Poles and other nationalities, led by Chair Mike Bowden, along with a warehouse filling up with medical and household supplies, a candle-production line, and the first of many hundreds of tonnes of aid heading out via lorry to Ukraine.

The core team soon featured two strong Ukrainian ladies – Nataliia and Vicky – who had worked together in Poland for many years, supporting Ukrainian businesses and trade connections. Vicky already had history of supporting displaced families, via the Democracy Angels foundation, which she had set up several years earlier with other colleagues based in Poland.

Meanwhile, in Vicky’s hometown of Bicester, and it surrounding villages, a large number of Ukrainian families had arrived to stay with local hosts/sponsors. The community came together via a huge number of local helpers and volunteers, and this became the Bicester Ukrainian Community Support (BUCS) group, led by local Ukrainian Vira and the Mayor, Alex. BUCS initially also sent vans of aid, but within a few months, focused purely on supporting Ukrainians that had come to the Bicester area, in many ways, such as paperwork, English lessons, mental health support and community events – all supported strongly by Cherwell District Council. Later on, BUCS also helped with finding jobs, and assisting Ukrainians to get into private rent.

While this was going on…Vicky, however, was commuting to Swindon to help SHAP: it was only in the summer of 2023 that she found out just how large the Ukrainian community in Bicester had become – and by getting to know Rob at BUCS, she found out all the other connections to local groups within Oxford, Islip, Waddesdon, Somerton, Reading and London. In turn, she introduced Rob to Mike and co at SHAP – and Mike’s own network of supporting groups further south. Rob, Mike and Vicky discussed keeping this network connected via “light touch#” communications – to provide mutual support to each other, to optimize the benefit that we can all bring for Ukraine.

The biggest requirement for SHAP and its network delivering physical aid to Ukraine was clear: fundraising, to enable them to continue and grow, because, as Mike noted in summer 2023:

“Funding is the key. We have the contacts volunteers and incredible access to high value and much needed aid, BUT: our model of working -born out of necessity – to beg others to fund trucks into Ukraine-is running out of puff. We desperately need direct funding but that is easier said than done. Our record to date of about 1400 tonnes delivered for £18,000 tells its own story.”

So, since BUCS was (and still is) focused principally on support to Bicester Ukrainians, and since both BUCS and SHAP are without the capacity/resource for fundraising, Vicky decided to set up a new group: a Bicester-based group with 2 primary goals:

[1] To fundraise for SHAP and its support network to deliver aid to Ukraine, plus its bus conversion programme (to provide e.g. mobile military hospital vehicles, kids play bus, etc.)

[2] To provide other direct support to Ukrainians in trouble at/near the front lines, on an ad-hoc basis (to date, this has included: working to rescue a famous Ukrainian artist stranded alone in a front-line city, and bring them to a host in the UK; a similar rescue for a Ukrainian fighter badly injured in the war; working with groups in Poland and Italy to facilitate trips for displaced/traumatized children, to help with their mental health).

And this group became BHAP, which developed its strategy over summer-autumn 2023. Its first Chair? – well Vicky was that cousin involved in bringing Maya and her family over to the UK at the very start of the war (they were interviewed on British TV as one of the first arrivals!)…and Maya became the first BHAP Chair. We have since been joined by our Webmaster Vasyl, and many who help us with events and translation: thank you, Halyna, Ivan, Sarah, Andrii, and the wonderful people at the Perch Eco Business Centre (especially Lucy and Shannon of TownSq).