2 April 2026
Walking, Talking, Finding Paths
People rally round when something terrible happens: an
accident, an illness, an invasion. Their compassion may be
a beautiful sight, but it’s a response to a moment. Their
involvement becomes harder to sustain once the moment
passes, and the terrible thing changes from a sudden drama
to a chronic condition. They begin to turn away and lose
touch. It happens with families, it happens with friends,
and it has happened with the Ukrainians displaced by the
invasion of their country four years ago.
Declines like these are often put down to ‘compassion
fatigue’, but that label always sounds like an excuse –
and it doesn’t seem to fit the picture for Ukrainians in
the UK. Polling shows that Britons’ sympathies with
Ukraine are holding strong and steady, unlike public
opinion in some other European countries. When British
people ask me how people in our local Ukrainian community
are doing, they don’t sound like they no longer care. They
sound like people who remain sympathetic and concerned,
but who haven’t yet found their own ways to connect with
the community they’re asking about.
We want to help them with that, though we don’t have many ready-made answers ourselves. What we do have are themes that resonate deeply with Ukrainians and non-Ukrainians alike: home, nature, place, landscape, belonging. Folklore is our way into these themes, but you don’t have to feel its enchantment in order to explore them with us, and to help bring a new community together around them.
My experience over the last several years tells me that this community shouldn’t just be new; it should do new things, forming new creative collaborations, inventing new activities, walking (literally!) as well as talking. Our journey to Ukraine last summer was an epic collaboration – perhaps more epic than we’d anticipated – and we want to build on it here in the UK. If you’d like to join in with the project, please follow us on social media (Instagram, Bluesky, YouTube), explore this website, sign up for our newsletter – and save the date of our Rose Hill midsummer event, June 18.More soon!
Marek