Active rehabilitation came to Ukraine not as a programme and not as an organisation, but as the way a few people decided to live differently. The legal entity appeared sixteen years after the first camp — and nearly everything described below rested on particular people who did it in their spare time and at their own expense.
Stoke Mandeville: sport as part of treatment
The Second World War set a grim record for the number of wounded. Military medicine learned to save those who would not have survived before, and the countries that fought were left with many veterans with spinal cord injuries and amputations. They were young and full of energy, and they wanted to live rather than merely see out their days.
Ludwig Guttmann was born in 1899 and was one of the best neurosurgeons in Germany. In 1933, as times changed for the Jewish population, he emigrated from Breslau to the United Kingdom and joined the neurosurgery department at Oxford.
In 1944 the British government asked Guttmann to set up a centre for servicemen with spinal cord injuries at Stoke Mandeville hospital. The centre opened that year with 60 beds; by 1966 there were 190. It was there that sport first became a compulsory part of treatment rather than entertainment after it. Guttmann’s principle was: what matters is not what has been lost, but what remains.
On 18 July 1948, the opening day of the London Olympics, Guttmann held the first demonstration archery competition for 16 veterans, men and women. It was called the Wheelchair Games, and later the Stoke Mandeville Games. By 1950 sixty British veterans took part; from 1952 the games became international, joined by the Netherlands; and by 1954 fourteen countries competed, Sweden among them. The word «Paralympic» came into use only in 1964: the Latin prefix para means «alongside», that is, games held next to the Olympics.
Sweden: a light wheelchair and the rule of passing it on
The Swedish PE teacher Karsten Inde taught blind people to swim. In 1976 he attended the Special Olympics in Toronto — and it was his meeting with the athletes Gregor Bonderud, Leir Hedman and Gunnar Årlind that started the group of enthusiasts from which active rehabilitation grew.
In the same year, at the 1976 Paralympic Games in Canada, Swedish athletes with spinal cord injuries saw that the Americans were far more self-reliant than they were — thanks to specialised training. Back home, they wanted to run the same training themselves.
Also in 1976, a 22-year-old motorcycle racer, Jalle Jungnell, sustained a spinal injury. The heavy, unwieldy wheelchairs of the time were unacceptable to him: in 1979 he created the JPS youth wheelchair, the prototype of today’s active-type chairs. The first SPINNER chairs went on sale in 1983, and in 1989 the company Panthera was founded — Jungnell still heads its design department.
The first two camps were held in March and August 1978 at Hasseludden. «In truth there was no thought-out plan and no weighty arguments, but even so the camps were fantastic in every respect,» Karsten Inde recalled.
It was there that the central rule began to work: a wheelchair user teaches a wheelchair user — once you have learned, teach someone else. At the first camp there was not a single assistant without a disability. And it was there that it became clear that a service team — volunteers who spot and assist — was indispensable; they were invited to the next camp.
In the spring of 1979 Karsten’s acquaintance Rolf Skog, a swimming coach, became director of the pool at a school in Boxholm. Everything needed was there: a pool, a sports hall, running tracks, accommodation and catering. Skog arranged lodging with the school and the commune, and the military bought bunk beds. Karsten arrived in a white second-hand Volvo Amazon, its trailer carrying all the equipment from the first two camps.
Participants and leaders of the earlier camps came to the first Boxholm camp, where a two-day mini-Olympics was held for the first time, with Sweden’s sporting elite taking part — athletes, swimmers, archers. The Boxholm methodology went into the rehabilitation of people with spinal cord injuries, and the activists themselves formed the organisation Rekryteringsgruppen (RG), which began running camps in many formats — for children, for women, mixed.
Poland: 1988
The idea reached Poland in the 1980s, where society was rather hostile to people with disabilities. With the help of the nurse Katarzyna Trok, several Polish participants were invited to a Swedish camp.
In August 1988 the first Polish camp took place — for instructors: 12 Swedish and 18 Polish instructors and 30 participants who wanted to become instructors. That same year the Foundation for Active Rehabilitation (FAR) was created, based in Warsaw; today it has a network of regional branches and the largest database on people with spinal injuries in Poland.
1991: the first camp in Saky
Perestroika opened the borders, and in 1989 Peter Andersen came to Moscow with friends. The Swedes were struck that there were no wheelchair users on the streets; they were told that occupational safety was excellent, so there were almost no injuries and hardly any disability.
Yet in the sauna of the Kosmos hotel — built for the 1980 Olympics and architecturally accessible — they saw two men in wheelchairs: Dmytro Syniakov and Yevhen Mykhailenko. They exchanged phone numbers, and the Swedes invited them and three other active people to a camp in Boxholm, held in 1990. Then came the proposal to find a place for a camp here — on condition that people from different republics were invited.
From 28 March to 10 April 1991, at the Burdenko sanatorium in Saky, the first active rehabilitation camp took place. RG sent a team of ten. There were 14 participants — from Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Lithuania, Kazakhstan, Georgia and Armenia — along with one member of the service team and a sociology student gathering material for her thesis. Six more people were recruited from the sanatorium’s guests, and the wives of two of them joined the service team.
There were not enough active-type wheelchairs brought from Sweden for everyone: they went first to people with cervical injuries, to women, and then to participants with upper thoracic injuries. The rest learned wheelchair skills on Soviet-made chairs.
Among the participants were Yaroslav Hrybalskyi (Ukraine), Igor Lavrentyev (Lithuania) and Maryna Holovina (Russia), who went on to work closely with RG and to organise camps in their own countries.
From 3 to 14 August 1991 a second camp was held with the Swedes in Izmailovo, Moscow. Hrybalskyi and Lavrentyev trained as weightlifting instructors, Holovina as head of the service team. The participants from Ukraine were Igor Hryhoriev, Svitlana Tryfonova, Valerii Holovin and Oleksandr Sukhan.
1992–2003: the Ukrainian movement
1992 — the first Ukrainian camp in Vynnyky, Lviv region. Here and at the camps that followed, the instructors came from Sweden, Poland and Ukraine.
1993 — the first camp in Lithuania, run by an international team; from Ukraine, Volodymyr Azin, Maryna Holovina and Halyna Tupailo.
1994 — Kyiv. That same year a group of eleven activists was invited to Sweden, where they were shown every aspect of life with a spinal cord injury: the social side, rehabilitation, sports halls, factories making active-type wheelchairs, and even the subject of having children.
1996 — Lviv. In the same year Andrii Vovkanych, Valerii Holovin and Maryna Holovina spent a month in Sweden: day camps in Bosön for children and women, and the camp in Boxholm, where Holovin worked as a wheelchair skills instructor. There they encountered «unusual» disciplines — canoeing, water skiing, diving, horse riding, buggies, basketball and rugby.
The trip bore fruit: at the Poltava camp in 1996, besides the usual disciplines, basketball appeared, and an organisational game was held for the first time so that participants would get to know one another faster. It was also the first camp where people trained not on Swedish wheelchairs but on Ukrainian ones, made at the Artemzvarka plant to a commercial order (model 126).
1996 — Ukraine begins producing its own active-type wheelchairs. The initiative came from former camp participants and instructors.
1997 — an international camp and seminar in Vynnyky, where students training as physical therapists worked in the service team for the first time, alongside Swedes and two representatives each from Belarus and Russia. In August the first camp in Belarus was held by a team from Poland, Sweden, Lithuania and Ukraine.
In the autumn of 1997, at the invitation of Rekryteringsgruppen, a group from Ukraine and Belarus travelled to Sweden together with engineers from the Kyiv Artem plant. They brought the Ukrainian model 126 wheelchair to be assessed by RG and Panthera specialists. The delegation visited the international rehabilitation equipment fair Hjultorget, one of the largest in Europe, and the testing laboratory of Handikappinstitutet. Katarzyna and Beniamin Trok gave the group invaluable help.
After his trip to Sweden, Andrii Vovkanych, a department head at the Lviv Institute of Physical Culture, opened a two-year full-time course for physical rehabilitation specialists, and later a department of its own.
1998 — Mykolaiv, organised by the Holovins, with leaders from Sweden, Poland and Belarus. That year Ukrainian leaders also travelled to Wrocław for the tenth anniversary of FAR.
1999 — Sloviansk. For the first time every participant was provided with a new active-type wheelchair designed and built in Kyiv (model 201).
2000–2002 — international training seminars for leaders in Poland: an exchange of experience between countries.
In total, between 1992 and 2003 Ukraine held 14 camps, two of them training seminars for instructors. They were run by civil society organisations that raised the money themselves — from sponsors, city budgets and donors abroad. At almost all of them, except Poltava in 1996 and Sloviansk in 1999, participants were given Swedish wheelchairs. From 2003 all camps have used Ukrainian ones.
The geography of those years: Lviv, Kyiv, Mykolaiv, Poltava, Sloviansk, Rivne, Yevpatoria.
Why the organisation appeared only in 2008
The question of a single organisation to develop active rehabilitation using the Rekryteringsgruppen methodology had been raised for years. But the law of the time required branches in at least 14 regions for all-Ukrainian status — and there were not yet that many leaders who knew about active rehabilitation and wanted to work in it.
2004–2010: Yevpatoria, First Contact and state support
From 2004 the camps were held at the Paralympic centre in Yevpatoria. State funding appeared for the first time — from Invasport and the Social Protection Fund, on top of sponsors’ money.
In February 2004 an international seminar on First Contact was held in Yevpatoria with Lithuania, Belarus, Sweden and Ukraine. It was there that the idea of state support for the camps was first voiced. In the years that followed, First Contact seminars and leadership training camps were held regularly.
It is important to understand: First Contact did not begin in 2023. From that seminar in 2004 and through all the years that followed, this work was done by people who took the initiative — they came to hospitals, sought out others like themselves, explained, demonstrated, supported. They simply did it on their own enthusiasm and without a system: without training, without steady funding, without agreements with the institutions. It became systematic and scalable only from 2023.
From 2008 seminars for medical staff ran alongside the camps, and were a success from the start.
2008: the organisation
In May 2008 the Ukrainian Association of Persons with Disabilities «Group for Active Rehabilitation» was officially registered.
In 2010 Tetiana Fomina created and ran the organisation’s first project of its own, «From volunteer to professional».
2014: losing the base
After the occupation of Crimea the camps lost the Paralympic base in Yevpatoria, where they had been held for ten years. The programme was restored at the Western Rehabilitation and Sports Centre in the village of Yavoriv, Lviv region, where a format was worked out that functions without a swimming pool or a large sports complex.
2017: six camps a year
Within the international TEAM project, supported by USAID, the National Assembly of People with Disabilities and UCP Wheels for Humanity, the number of camps grew to six a year. Camps appeared for people with cervical injuries — the most complex group, which had not been reached before.
2022: the war changes the scale
The first months of the full-scale invasion meant evacuating people from occupied areas, and housing and transport for those displaced. Later, wounded servicemen with spinal cord injuries came to the organisation, and this changed both who takes part and the national conversation about rehabilitation.
2023: First Contact becomes a system
The work that individual enthusiasts had carried for twenty years became a programme: instructors with their own experience of injury work in state hospitals under agreements with those institutions, complete formal training, keep records, and come to a person in the first weeks after they are wounded — not years after discharge.
Today
Active rehabilitation camps, remote counselling, accessibility audits of communities, training for medical staff and work on national barrier-free policy. The principle is the same as in Boxholm in 1978: a person is taught by someone who has been through the same thing.
Sources
This page is based on materials by Maryna Holovina and the site archive. A brochure on the history of the movement (PDF, 17 pages). Individual stories are in the History section.