Founder Hamdi Ulukaya & Tent Visit Poland/Ukraine Border
On April 7, 2022, Hamdi Ulukaya and the Tent team visited Krakow and the Poland/Ukraine border with UNHCR to see their incredible response to the refugee crisis first-hand. The people of Poland have shown outstanding hospitality to their Ukrainian neighbors, and have welcomed more than 2.7 million people from Ukraine into the country. Scroll through the slideshow below for the trip’s highlights.
In Krakow, UNHCR recently opened a cash enrollment center to provide Ukrainian families with critical financial support while they are displaced. With the help of local authorities, and some companies - including IKEA, Uber, Adecco, and Hilton - UNHCR was able to open this enrollment center in just one week.
At a visit to a “Blue Dot” site in Krakow, the group spoke with a Ukrainian mother who had fled with her nine-month old baby. Blue Dot sites are protective services sites co-managed by UNHCR, UNICEF, and other partners that provide a suite of services including family identification, housing support, and more. As nearly half of refugees fleeing Ukraine are children, these sites cater primarily to the needs of children and families.
The UNHCR warehouse in Rzeszów is a major staging site for the humanitarian response in Ukraine. At the warehouse, inventory such as kitchen sets, clothes, blankets, and mattresses, are stored until they are ready to be dispatched to internally displaced people in Ukraine.
Medkya is a border town in Poland, approximately 50 miles from Lviv, Ukraine. Medyka has been one of the major crossing points for people fleeing Ukraine.
As refugees from Ukraine arrive in Medyka they can receive immediate assistance from hundreds of volunteers - they can get a cup of soup, rest, or visit UNHCR’s Blue Dot site - before being transported to their next destination.
In Rzeszów, Tent founder Hamdi Ulukaya met with U.S. Chargés d’Affaires to Ukraine, Kristina Kvien, to better understand how Tent and our member companies can best support the needs of refugees from Ukraine as they arrive in their new communities.