(BRETT) DROZD WAS BORN IN Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Canada was home, but so was Ukraine. Although he had never visited before 2022, never even travelled to Europe, he grew up in a household with generations-deep Ukrainian roots. His great-grandparents had fled the Russian Revolution more than a century ago, settling on the Prairies. He grew up in a household in which many extended family members spoke Ukrainian as their first language, where eating borscht, varenyky (pierogies), and holubtsi (cabbage rolls) was a regular occurrence.

At thirty, Drozd was a straight-A university student working on the prerequisites for a doctor of pharmacy program. He was less than a year from starting when news broke that Russia had invaded Ukraine. Watching columns of tanks roll toward Kyiv was a distraction too hard to ignore. “It became obvious very quickly that this isn’t good for me,” he recalled while navigating the highway, “to try to churn through the motions back at home when my mind and my heart were with Ukraine.” He needed to do something.

The decision, in the end, was easy. Drozd finished the semester, and on Mother’s Day 2022, he and his family gathered on his grandmother’s front lawn and said their goodbyes. In a short time, the diligent student with no experience in war zones found himself in Ukraine with one goal: to be useful. What he lacked in hard, related skills, he either learned by watching YouTube videos or made up for in determination and resourcefulness.

The ragtag nature of volunteering in Ukraine often runs counter to the commonly held belief that aid organizations are giant, well-oiled machines that go into the most dangerous areas, ensuring critical supplies reach those who need them most. The reality is that, although there are big organizations like the United Nations on the ground, they’re understandably doing their best to minimize the risks they take, said Drozd. As a result, smaller villages closer to the front lines are often inaccessible for aid deliveries and evacuations. So, a relatively small number of independent volunteers, alongside smaller non-governmental organizations (NGOs), put themselves in harm’s way to connect the critical dots that the bigger organizations can’t—or won’t. Drozd became one of them.