Refugee-support non-profit opens guest house for displaced Ukrainians in New Hamburg

Ukrainian newcomers Olha Polusmiak, Viktoriia Makarova and Grassroots Response to the Ukrainian Crisis founder and president Steph Goertz stand in front of the New Grassroots Ukrainian Guest House at 225 Huron St. in New Hamburg. Makarova is holding one of her paintings, which she will be displaying and selling as part of the eighth annual New Hamburg Art Show. Galen Simmons photo

Galen Simmons, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Ukrainian refugees hoping to establish a life for themselves in New Hamburg and the surrounding Wilmot Township now have a temporary place to call home.

Last week, Grassroots Response to the Ukrainian Crisis, a non-profit started by Petersburg resident Steph Goertz in 2022 that has since helped more than 4,500 Ukrainians displaced by the war with Russia find homes – and lives – in Canada, announced it has opened a new Ukrainian Guest House at 225 Huron St. in New Hamburg. Formerly owned by the Baechler family and having played a role in welcoming Mennonite refugees from in and around Ukraine, the home is currently owned by Greg and Marie Voisin and is providing temporary housing for Ukrainians as they seek to establish a new life in Wilmot.

“As an organization, we’re not providing long-term housing,” Goertz said. “We’ve had a huge success rate of helping families to get employed, to get on their feet. Because we work with so many volunteers, we connect these families with many people in the community so they feel integrated, they feel that they have the community around them to help them.

“We provide them with the housing, we connect them with as many volunteers as possible and then the goal is to get them employed. Once they’re employed and they feel they can rent on their own, they have the social connections they need to feel integrated. … They have the people in the community that can offer them assistance.”

With houses like the one in New Hamburg already established in communities across the province, including in Kitchener, Cambridge, Guelph and even as far north as Thunder Bay, Grassroots Response helps Ukrainians find and establish lives in places where they can feel comfortable and part of that community.

For Ukrainian graphic designer and painter Viktoriia Makarova and her mother, Olha Polusmiak, a smaller community like New Hamburg, where they have been living in the Grassroots Guest House since the beginning of July, turned out to be exactly the right fit.

After being displaced from their home city of Kherson, Ukraine, at the beginning of the war in 2022, the little family has moved from a refugee camp in Germany to Brampton in Canada and to the Grassroots Guest House in Cambridge before finally settling in New Hamburg. Along the way, Makarova’s grandmother, who had left Ukraine with her family, passed away in Germany. During the journey however, Makarova, who was pregnant when she left Germany, gave birth to a daughter.

While their journey has been long and fraught with difficulties like so many of the journeys for Ukrainians seeking new lives in Canada, Makarova says she and her mother have fallen in love with their new community and they have high hopes they’ll be able to stay and establish a life in New Hamburg.

“It’s not like a big town, it’s just small,” Makarova said. “You go around in one day and you know this town. We sit here on our balcony and somebody who lives in New Hamburg goes around and says, ‘We support Ukraine and we are together and you are strong.’

“ … (Kherson) is like a big city. It’s like Waterloo-Kitchener, but we have towns like New Hamburg (in Ukraine), and actually it’s good. Sometimes for my business or my art show, I need to go to a big city like Hamilton or Toronto. Right now, my education is in graphic design but I am an artist, I have a lot of paintings and I paint acrylic.”

While the Grassroots volunteers in New Hamburg have helped Makarova secure part-time work at Pet Valu in town, she is especially excited about being part of the upcoming New Hamburg Art Tour Sept. 20 and 21. During the eighth annual event, Makarova will join other local artists in displaying and selling her work at the New Hamburg Community Centre.

Other Ukrainians living locally, like Oksana Arkadia and daughter Viktoriia Van Faassen, are also being assisted by the local Grassroots volunteers. Both women are highly educated – Arkadia was a micro-biology professor for 30 years and Van Fassen has a master’s degree in landscaping – but they speak very little English.

While both women have worked hard to have their education, credentials and experience officially recognized by employers in Canada, Goertz said the key to finding them work in their fields is connecting them with local volunteers who can use their networks of family, friends and acquaintances to find employers who see their value despite their lack of English language skills.

To help Grassroots Response continue to support Ukrainians in need both in navigating the immigration process on the ground in Europe and in providing them housing and the necessities of life while establishing those all-important community connections here in Canada, Goertz said the organization is absolutely dependent on donations.

“We don’t have a huge budget. If all of the 15 families we’ve been talking with suddenly need housing, we don’t have enough,” Goertz said. “So, we then will spend what money we have to rent a new place in order to ensure they have a safe place to live, and then there’s the cost of making repairs or providing the things they need to live in that house.”

For more information about Grassroots Response to the Ukrainian Crisis and to donate, visit www.wrgrassrootsresponse.ca. The organization partners with newcomer resettlement and multicultural organizations in every community it has a house in. Thanks to its partnership with the Kitchener-Waterloo Multicultural Centre, it can provide charitable tax receipts to those who donate to the cause.