Annual Report 2025

Annual Report 2025

Foreword

Despite all the challenges that 2025, the fourth year of the "full-fledged war", brought to Ukrainian society, we remained faithful to our mission. We equipped people to reach out to children — children who need understanding with supportive adults alongside them.

Children Mission team promoted the OpSAFE Trauma Care Program and trained teams from different contexts — schools, children’s learning centers, churches, and camp providers. Based on our contacts with Armenian faith-based NGOs and churches, the "Thrive Together" project was born. This is an Armenian version of the OpSAFE Trauma Care Program. A Ukrainian team plans to travel to Armenia in May 2026 to train locals to use the program for refugee children from Nagorno-Karabakh.

We developed the new webinar on resilience for adults, which later grew into a specialized course for parents, "How to Support a Child during War". Thanks to online webinars, we have contact with Ukrainian refugees from across the EU. We have motivated many of them to attend a longer, international training course planned for the first half of 2026.

At last, our dream came true: we developed 12 therapeutic Bible lessons and 12 therapeutic stories that children’s workers and parents can use free of charge at home and in their curricula (we thank Samaritan’s Purse for the grant that made this possible).

Finally, we were invited to the Jacaranda Communities of Hope training and emotional healing camp. Based on what we learned, and in consultation with the Jacaranda trainers, we are developing a training curriculum to equip Ukrainian practitioners without medical training in how to support children with emotional trauma.

Sadly, the war is not over. Therefore, children will require emotional support and profound answers to many existential questions in life that their parents, caregivers, teachers, and pastors will need to provide. Children Mission is committed to training all these adults to be available to respond to children’s needs.

Lyudmila Bryn
Executive Director, Children Mission

Milestones in 2025

Operation SAFE and Trauma Care Training

In 2025, Children Mission continued to build the capacity of communities across Ukraine to care for children living in the shadow of war. Through the Operation SAFE (OpSAFE) trauma care program and a broad range of emotional healing training, we helped local teams create safe, structured environments where children can regain stability, process painful experiences, and find their way back to a sense of normal life.

Our training model is both proven and practical. We work through flexible formats designed to meet teams wherever they are: self-paced video learning supported by guided consultations, live online sessions, and hybrid trainings that combine in-person practice with online teaching. This flexibility has been essential. Power outages, travel risks, and the relentless pressures of life in a war zone make rigid schedules impossible. By adapting to those realities, we have enabled children’s workers, teachers, and volunteers across the country to keep serving their communities with skill and confidence.

Alongside OpSAFE, we expanded our library of therapeutic stories and lessons, providing practitioners with concrete tools to help children give voice to fear, loss, anger, and hope. These resources also strengthened the adults who deliver them, many of whom carry significant emotional burdens of their own. Participants consistently told us that the trainings helped them feel steadier, better equipped, and more confident in moments of crisis.

Building Skills that Last

The impact of this work extends well beyond any single training session. Short courses provide participants with practical grounding in psychological first aid, enabling them to sustain their own emotional resilience and understand how children process loss. Longer programs offer deeper formation for parents, teachers, and community leaders committed to walking alongside children through trauma with consistency and care.

The results are tangible. Teams that completed OpSAFE training have gone on to lead camps, clubs, and Sunday school programs that give children a structured path toward emotional recovery. Others have drawn on therapeutic lessons in small group or one-on-one settings, helping children put words and images to emotions they had struggled to name.

The teams we trained in 2025 conducted 16 OpSAFE Trauma Care programs (including camps, clubs, and Sunday school settings) that benefitted 520 children. 39 holiday programs (one-day-long Christmas and Easter programs) provided short-term trauma care support to an additional 1,667 children.

Numerical Impact of 2025 Activities

New Developments

In August, we were invited to attend the Jacaranda Communities of Hope training and emotional healing camp in Irpin. The Jacaranda program was developed by American clinical psychologist Dr. Timothy Friesen. It teaches practitioners who are not medical professionals the basics of emotional trauma and the practical skills they need to support children with emotional trauma. Two Children Mission trainers attended the pilot training and camp organized by Dutch charity Our Daily Bread. After the training, Jacaranda and Our Daily Bread decided to work with Children Mission, given their training experience and network, to develop a Ukrainian training program based on Jacaranda. This training will be rolled out in 2026.

In view of the great demand for therapeutic Bible lessons, the training team for Basic trainings plans to develop six more lessons.

Both training teams are developing new trainings:

• Trauma Care training team — webinar "A Child: Naughty or Traumatized?"
• Basic trainings team — webinar on Discipline; modules on Experiential Learning and Memorizing Big Portions of Scripture.

Networking

Networking with other active organizations in our field — both state (such as schools and kindergartens) and non-governmental (charity foundations, NGOs, churches) — enables us to reach more children affected by war. Lyudmila Bryn, our Executive Director, therefore participated in several online conferences for educators. The interest built there led to a business trip to the Transcarpathian region in November 2025, during which she presented the OpSAFE program and conducted a training session on resilience. Several schools with high numbers of internally displaced children became interested in OpSAFE, but government schools do not have the money to finance a camp. We are therefore looking for funding partners.

Lyudmila also participated in the Steering Committee for the REC Movement meeting in Portugal (September 29 – October 1, 2025) and the Lausanne Europe conference in Spain (October 16–18, 2025). Attending these two events advanced Children Mission’s voice on behalf of Ukrainian children in the EU arena, promoted the sharing of experiences, and opened up networking opportunities for different projects. As a result of these events, Children Mission received a grant from WWO-EU to participate in the Hope for Action Forum in Bucharest (March 10–13, 2026), and Lyudmila Bryn was invited as a guest trainer for the second week of the Leadership Experience-Europe "Children’s Context" in Albania (September 28 – October 2, 2026).

Financial Accountability

A summary of Children Mission’s balance, income, and expenditure is presented below.

We are grateful to all organizations, churches, and individuals who make our work possible through their generous donations.

Summary of Income and Expenditure in 2025