Two weeks ago, Hanken held a seminar titled \u201cUkraine – why help with cash instead of\ngoods?\u201d<\/em><\/a>.\n<\/em>The purposes of\nthis event were twofold: to raise awareness about the humanitarian supply chain\nissue that is unsolicited donations, and to encourage people and organizations\nto donate money to humanitarian organizations working on the ground in Ukraine.\nSince then, the problem of goods donations blocking supply chains delivering\naid to Ukraine has been discussed more widely in the media, and many\nhumanitarian organizations have made statements asking for money rather than in-kind\ndonations. Wojciech Piotrowicz and Sarah Schiffling explain this matter well in\na recent article in The Conversation<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What about donating things for people closer to\nhome? I happen to have worked in some of the sorting centres that were set up\naround Helsinki when a large (well, in Finnish terms, anyway) number of\nrefugees came here in 2015-2016. I noticed two things: One, people really wanted\nto help, and that\u2019s a lovely thing. Two, people did not consider the needs of\nthe people they were trying to help. What followed was that in January 2016,\nlocal charities and humanitarian organizations received masses of bikinis,\nstrappy summer dresses, shorts, dress shoes, sandals and dirty, worn out, ready\nto-be-recycled clothes. In other words, not something anyone, let alone a\npredominantly Muslim group of recipients would need during Finnish winter. Now,\namongst all that unwanted stuff, there were also a lot of great donations:\nwinter boots, winter jackets, new underwear, new socks, clothes that fit the\nneeds and preferences of the people they were given to. To find these useful\nthings among the mountains of rags and worn-out sandals, ludicrous amounts of\nprofessional and volunteer work hours were needed. Storage and sorting\nfacilities, too. Transportation. Logistics, basically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “One, people really wanted to help…two, people did not consider the needs of the people they were trying to help”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Incidentally, I was finishing my bachelor\u2019s\ndegree at Hanken at the time, with Supply Chain Management and Social Responsibility\nas my major and Humanitarian Logistics as my favourite subject. So, I decided\nto study the clothing collection for asylum seekers in Finland and try to\nidentify challenges and ways to improve the matching of donations and needs. The\nchallenges were unsurprising: unwanted donations clog up supply chains, causing\ndelays in delivery and distribution and wasting resources. This was a very\nsmall case in comparison to Ukraine, but from what I gather through reports\ncoming from the Ukraine-Poland border, the lesson has not been learnt and the\nsame problems exist, only on a much larger scale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I want to add another little aspect on top of\nthe supply chain one. Interviews with recipients for my thesis showed that\nclothing donations are important for people who have lost almost all their\npossessions when fleeing from crisis, but also that the quality of these\ndonations must be high enough in order for them to increase the wellbeing of\nthe recipients. This brings me to perhaps my favourite word in the humanitarian\nfield: dignity. When you\u2019re helping someone, try to reflect whether you are\ndoing it in a way that upholds or, ideally, lifts their dignity. Quite\nliterally: put yourself in someone else\u2019s (old) shoes. Would you feel better in\nsomeone\u2019s broken, muddy loafers, or would you in fact feel better in your own\nbroken, muddy loafers, if it spared you the slight humiliation?<\/p>\n\n\n\n What other ways can just anyone without\nhumanitarian training and expertise help people? When more refugees arrive in\nour hometown, what can we do? One question that came from the audience during\nHanken\u2019s seminar was hosting refugees in our own home. As Gy\u00f6ngyi Kov\u00e1cs so\naptly put it: That\u2019s great! Who would want to live at a reception centre?\nStaying in a local home, making friends and local connections, and becoming\nintegrated into the host society would surely be a much more appealing option\nto anyone, anywhere. Gy\u00f6ngyi did point out that such commitment should not be\ntaken lightly, as there is no guarantee that everyone will get along for a\nlonger period of time. But we have seen people in Finland opening their homes\nto refugees already, and that to me is a wonderful thing to see. In conclusion:\nmore compassion and more efficiency, less spring cleaning and solo adventures\nto an already overcrowded context. Those are my two cents on this matter, but\nmy brilliant colleagues Wojciech Piotrowicz, Amin Maghsoudi, Russell Harpring\nand Graham Heaslip bring forth more elaborate and convincing arguments in these\nopen access articles: Cash and Voucher Assistance along\nHumanitarian Supply Chains: A Literature Review and Directions for Future\nResearch and\nIn-kind donations, cash transfers\nand local procurement in the logistics of caring for internally displaced\npersons: The case of Polish humanitarian NGOs and Ukrainian IDPs<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mimmi<\/em> P\u00f6ysti is a project coordinator at the HUMLOG Institute, having both received her Masters in Humanitarian Logistics and worked in the field, she now brings her knowledge background, real-world experience, and academic expertise to support and coordinate research across the HUMLOG Institute. To reach out with any questions, send am email to HUMLOG@hanken.fi with the subject line “HUMLOG Blog”. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 16.03.2022 By Mimmi P\u00f6ysti Project Coordinator at the Humanitarian Logistics and Supply Chain Research (HUMLOG) Institute at Hanken School of Economics Two weeks ago, Hanken held a seminar titled \u201cUkraine […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-practitioners"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/humlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/humlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/humlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/humlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/humlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=534"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/humlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":675,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/humlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534\/revisions\/675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/humlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/humlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/humlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}