PALMERSTON – Ukrainians displaced by the war have a soft place to land here, thanks to support from St. James United Church and Palmerston Evangelical Missionary Church (PEMC).
The churches partnered with Waterloo Region Grassroots Response to the Ukrainian Crisis to rent and furnish two large houses in Palmerston.
Together the two houses will provide shelter for about 15 people.
The Ukrainians chose Palmerston intentionally – they are people interested in living in a small rural setting with work experience that fits well into the community, said Evelyn McComb of PEMC.
“It took a village” to get the two homes ready, said Dianne Speers, council chair at James Street United Church.
The bigger of the two houses, set up by the United Church, is expected to house nine people.
A large room was transformed into four bedrooms for four single women.
The home will also house a single mother and her teenage son, and a family of three with two parents and a teenage son.
PEMC expects the house they set up to host a family of five, with two parents and three children, McComb said. The family has been in Canada for about a year, and is currently living in Maryhill. They are in the process of confirming their transition to Palmerston.
“The dad of this family is a drywaller and a masonry guy from home so they will be able to pick up a job with his skills pretty quickly,” McComb said, and “the mom and oldest son are fine working in a factory kind of setting.”
Only fathers with at least three children are allowed to leave Ukraine, she noted, so for families with one or two children, “dad often has to stay back and fight.”
McComb noted these Ukrainians are not technically refugees, so they call them Ukrainian friends and Ukrainian settlers instead.
“If somebody comes as a refugee, permanent residency is much easier to attain than the Ukraine situation,” she noted.
While the churches secured the rental houses and covered the cost of the initial setup, the Ukrainians will be working in the community and will pay their own rent moving forward.
PEMC covered the rent for the first and last month, and will assist with rent and utilities as needed moving forward, asking the Ukrainians to contribute what they can each month.
“So as a church family we are helping them significantly initially and then trying to pull back.”
McComb said the plan is for the Ukrainians to be able to cover their own rent and utilities within a year, noting the newcomers are “very keen to work [and] very keen to be self-sufficient.”
For the United Church it wasn’t hard to find furniture, appliances and other household items to fill the homes, Speers said, and she was amazed and “overwhelmed with the amount of stuff” that was donated.
“I had to turn furniture away,” she added, and they “didn’t have to buy a thing.”
Donations came from members of the United Church congregation as well as others in the community who heard about the initiative through word of mouth, Speers said.
The donations included “10 beds in lovely shape,” new pillows and towels, and kitchen appliances, she said.
“We set up a house in 24 hours with donations,” she said, after volunteers gave the house a thorough cleaning.
For PEMC, McComb said it was “actually quite tricky” to find a house to rent and set it up with furniture.
“A lot of landlords want to know who is coming to rent the place,” she noted, but this initiative works by securing housing first before connecting with Ukrainians in need.
“It took a bit of time for the church to figure out how to manage this and how to fund this appropriately,” she added.
It was important to them to ensure they were “supporting families that are in true need,” she said.
“Having a whole congregation behind us is super helpful – that’s how we acquired all the furniture, is through the generosity of our congregation.
“It’s been a really great effort and very heartwarming to see how quickly people in our congregation and the community have been working together,” McComb said.
Community support includes Blessings to You thrift store, which has invited the Ukrainians to pick out any clothing and additional household items they need, and the Palmerston Lions Club, which is providing funding for translators.
“It’s a really good community pooling together effort to welcome the families,” McComb said.
The leg-up from the churches and the shared housing is intended to help them “get ahead to get their own place, or get a car,” Speers said.
She added that with how expensive rent is, “these single ladies, how would they get anything over here” without support? Especially the “single mom with her son and only one income.”
When displaced Ukrainian families first arrive in Canada, adults receive $3,000 and children receive $1,500, “to help them cover their first couple weeks,” McComb said.
They then apply for social insurance numbers to enable them to work.
Most of the Ukrainians who will be living in the two houses have already secured work in Palmerston, including at TG Minto auto parts manufacturer, Speers said. One of the men is a mechanic and has been calling around to find a position.
Before their move to Palmerston, most of them have been staying in temporary residences in Maryhill and in university residences in Waterloo Region, Speers said.
Those in university residences need “to be out by the first of August,” she added, as that’s when international students will arrive and move in.
Waterloo Region Grassroots Response to the Ukrainian Crisis is a Mennonite-based organization with over 500 volunteers to support newly arrived Ukrainians.
“The program is designed to give them a spot to land until they can go home,” McComb noted.
There are already other newly arrived Ukrainian families in Palmerston, as well as Harriston and Listowel, Speers said.
McComb said when the war first broke out most displaced Ukrainians wanted to stay closer to their home county, with many not wanting to travel further than Poland.
But “now that the war has been going on for more than a year and is still super intense, now people are venturing further afield.”
For more information on Waterloo Region Grassroots Response to the Ukrainian Crisis visit www.wrgrassrootsresponse.ca.
