In the PFA Accelerator, practitioners supporting children are teaching each other what works.
Every Friday, more than 240 education, social work, and health professionals across Ukraine and Europe file reports on the same question: What happened when you tried to help a child this week?
Their answers – grounded in their daily work – are creating new insights into how Psychological First Aid (“PFA”) works in active conflict zones, displacement centers, and communities hosting Ukrainian families. These practitioners implement practical actions with children each week, then share what they learn with colleagues from all over Europe who face similar challenges.
The tracking reveals stark patterns. More than half work with children showing anxiety, fear, and stress responses triggered by air raids, family separation, or displacement. Another 42% focus on children struggling to connect with others in unfamiliar places—Ukrainian teenagers isolated in Polish schools, families in Croatian refugee centers, children moved from eastern Ukraine to western regions.
“We have a very unique experience that you cannot get through lectures,” said PFA practitioner and Ukrainian-language facilitator Hanna Nyzkodobova during Monday’s session, speaking to over 200 of her peers. “The Ukrainian context is not comparable to any other country.”
Locally-led organizations leading implementation
The programme’s most striking feature is its reach into organizations operating closest to active hostilities—precisely where support needs are most acute and convention training programs may not operate. For example, the charitable foundation “Everything will be fine Ukraine” implements approaches within 20 kilometers of active fighting, supporting 6,000 children across Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, and Kharkiv regions. Weekly reports from their participants document how psychological first aid help when air raid sirens interrupt sessions or when families face repeated displacement.
Posmishka UA, Ukraine’s largest participating organization with over 400 staff members, demonstrates how peer learning can support local actors directly at scale. During Monday’s learning session, Posmishka participants shared experiences from work in local communities that would be difficult to capture through conventional research or training approaches.
South Ukrainian National Pedagogical University has integrated the program across 339 faculty and 3,783 students, bringing PFA into the work of its Mental Health Center. Youth Platform is now offering PFA to 600 young people aged 14-35 across five Ukrainian regions, while the All-Ukrainian Public Center “Volunteer” scales implementations to over 10,000 children nationwide.
These partnerships reveal something crucial: when crisis response is most urgent, peer learning between local actors may prove more effective and sustainable than waiting for external expertise and costly training to develop solutions.
Learning what works through implementation
The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF) and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), within the project Provision of quality and timely psychological first aid to people affected by Ukraine crisis in impacted countries, supported by the European Union, created what they call the PFA Accelerator—a component of a broader certificate program reaching over 330 organizations supporting more than 1 million children affected by the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine. This “Accelerator” methodology emerged from recognizing that new approaches are necessary in unprecedented crises. When children face trauma from active conflict, family separation, and repeated displacement simultaneously, guidelines can help but cannot tell you how to adapt to your specific situation.
The breakthrough lies in turning scale from an obstacle into an advantage. Rather than trying to train individuals who then work in isolation, the programme creates learning networks where practitioners immediately share what works, what doesn’t, and why.
Analysis of the first 60 action plans shows PFA Accelerator participants setting specific, measurable goals: 88% of those working with anxious children plan concrete emotional regulation activities rather than vague “support” approaches.
Iryna from Kryvyi Rih reported that schools actively sought partnerships after her initial outreach succeeded: “They wanted us to come to them,” she said, describing how her mobile facilitation team exceeded the goal she set for herself in the Accelerator – because she managed to help school administrators recognize the value of Psychological First Aid (PFA) for children.
Practical innovations emerge from necessity
The weekly implementation requirement forces creative problem-solving with limited resources. Mariya from Zaporizhzhia described combining parent and child sessions: “We conducted joint sessions with psychosocial support, where together we learned calming techniques and did exercises oriented toward team building.” This approach addressed both parent stress and child needs while optimizing scarce time and space resources.
In the PFA Accelerator, other participants can then share their feedback – or realize that Mariya’s local solution can help them, too. “The exchange of experience that happens on this platform is very important because someone is more experienced, someone less experienced,” noted participant Liubov during the Ukrainian session.
Such practical adaptations become documented knowledge shared across the network. However, in the first week, although 82% identify colleague support as their primary resource, only 49% initially planned collaborative approaches involving other adults. The peer feedback process helps participants recognize such patterns and adjust their methods accordingly.
Defying distance to solve problems together
What emerges is not only better implementation of existing approaches—it’s new knowledge about how psychological support works under difficult conditions. The weekly reports create rapid feedback loops showing which approaches help children cope with ongoing uncertainty, how to maintain therapeutic relationships during displacement, and which interventions remain effective when basic safety cannot be guaranteed.
The programme operates across Ukraine and 27 European countries, supported by over 80 European focal points and more than 20 organizational partners. This enables pattern recognition impossible without scale. Practitioners can better discern which approaches work across different contexts, how cultural differences affect intervention effectiveness, and which methods prove most adaptable to rapidly changing circumstances.
The larger significance extends beyond Ukraine. By demonstrating how local actors can rapidly develop and refine effective practices when given proper structure for peer learning, the programme offers a model for responding to other crises where traditional expert-led approaches prove too slow or disconnected from local realities. Sometimes the most valuable expertise exists not in training manuals but in the accumulated experience of practitioners working directly with affected populations.
Learn more and enroll in the PFA Accelerator: https://www.learning.foundation/ukraine-accelerator
This project is funded by the European Union. Its contents are the sole responsibility of TGLF and IFRC, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.
