Using the WINGS intervention, Club Eney provides women in Ukraine with resources and support, despite the difficulties of wartime.
Club Eney, a Ukrainian NGO with locations throughout the country, has served women who use drugs, women living with HIV, and women who engage in sex work, among other vulnerable populations, for more than 20 years. Club Eney provides a wide range of harm reduction and counseling services to these women. In doing this work, Club Eney observed high rates of gender-based violence (GBV) among the women they serve, and they took action to address the issue. In search of a GBV prevention program that would be suitable for women they serve, they applied for and received funding to develop two pilot projects.
Through the pilot projects, which launched in 2019 and 2020, they determined that the best course forward was adapting WINGS to meet specific needs and contexts of the different groups of women they work with. Over the following years they adapted WINGS for five groups and contexts: women who engage in sex work, women living with HIV, internally displaced persons, wartime conditions, and adding a brief HIV risk screening.
Since 2019, they have been able to:
- Train 35 community leaders to address violence against women who use drugs and women who engage in sex work, facilitate the WINGS intervention, and create and use an online WINGS tool;
- Conduct a supervisory session online with those facilitators with Louisa Gilbert, PhD;
- Administer the WINGS GBV screening to more than 4,000 women who use drugs and women who engage in sex work, and assist them with safety planning and identifying service needs;
- Provide more than 2,500 women with HIV prevention services, referrals to legal assistance and psychological counseling, humanitarian assistance, and more.
Much of this work has been done under tremendously difficult conditions. Facilitators with Club Eney have conducted sessions during blackouts, during air raids, and in bomb shelters. The option to hold sessions online has been tremendously helpful, especially in reaching women who evacuated Ukraine to other countries to escape the war. During the invasion, their work has become more challenging and more important as they support women made especially vulnerable by being unable to return to their homes and missing their documents.
WINGS facilitator Olga Motornenko, who works in the Poltava region, said, “During the implementation of the project, we noted many positive points. These are the changes in the lives of women who implemented safety plans, the joy of receiving financial aid, the feeling of warmth and support in groups. In this difficult time of full scale invasion in our country, such support and help is needed like a breath of fresh air, because it is a miracle to see how a depressed, trembling woman with a bowed head turns into a self-confident beauty capable of defending her interests and protecting her neighbor.”
With support from ViiV Healthcare and the UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women, Club Eney has continued this work and will be able to implement WINGS in 16 regions of Ukraine until 2026.