Teaching one person matters. Changing the rules that thousands live by matters more. That is why part of GAR’s work happens not at a camp, but in hospitals, universities, the media, and the offices where decisions are made.

Inside the public health system

The First Contact programme works inside state hospitals: an instructor with their own experience of injury comes to a person in the first weeks after they are wounded. That changes not only the fate of one patient, but the medical team’s idea of what is possible at all.

Training for medical professionals

Seminars and webinars for doctors, physical and occupational therapists, nurses and students of specialised universities. We are consistently replacing the outdated medical model of disability with the modern biopsychosocial one — the model in which the problem lies not in the person, but in the barriers around them.

The public conversation

Participants’ stories, conference talks, work with the media. According to our own archive of publications, the organisation already has hundreds of mentions in national and regional media — and every one of them is another chance that a person after an injury will hear about active rehabilitation immediately, rather than five years later.

International standards

Our leaders train in Norway, Sweden, Poland and Latvia, and bring back not individual exercises but whole systems: personal assistance (BPA), accessibility auditing, the rights of people with disabilities under the UN Convention. These are things that Ukrainian law either lacks, or has only on paper.

Together with the community

GAR is an organisation of people with disabilities, not for people with disabilities. Decisions are made by those they concern. Membership is the most direct way to influence them.