Marta Dzhumaha was woken up in her Kyiv home by the sound of Russian forces dropping bombs on the morning of February 24.
Like many of her colleagues at BetterMe, she fled Ukraine’s capital to the west of the country in search of safety – but knew she couldn’t do anything to stop the war, but she could help those affected.
BetterMe, a physical and mental health online platform whose headquarters are based in Kyiv, launched the Creating Freedom Within sportswear collection in the colours of blue and yellow to raise money for UNICEF Ukraine.
Dzhumaha spoke to Female First about why the company launched this collection and how she feels to be able to help her country during war.
What is BetterMe?
We are a Ukrainian based company, we are a healthcare company, we developed two healthcare apps and users tell us they’re supportive, so we call them supportive apps. Its BetterMe health coaching and BetterMe mental health and to continue this way we also launched a sportswear collection previously in 2021. But now we are focussed on helping affected people and affected children, so we launched a special collection to fundraise money for affected children, so this collection is in blue and yellow colours, so we thought this was symbolic not only for Ukrainians but for Europeans and I hope for the whole world.
We have more than a hundred million users worldwide and we’re really proud of those numbers because we are working really hard to help people form a healthy lifestyle and also for all kinds of people to form this lifestyle because we want to support different groups of people, for example we have content for people using wheelchairs, we have special training for seniors, also we have special content for body positive people and so on. Our mission I think is to make a healthy lifestyle as accessible and as inclusive as possible, so that’s who we are.
When did you decide to launch the sportswear collection to raise money for UNICEF efforts in Ukraine?
Not all but many of BetterMe team members are located in Ukraine and we are observers of all these things because the headquarters of our company was in Kyiv and I was living in Kyiv too, and Kyiv was the city where everything started on February 24. So, for example I woke up to the sound of bombs and shells near my home so I was scared to hell to be honest, and everyone was really overwhelmed with all of this, and it was all over the news, we were really tired of reading it, but we couldn’t stop reading it.
Our founder, Victoria Repa, is from Donbas and Donbas was the region that was occupied by Russia back in 2014, so she was deprived of her home back then in 2014 and now she was deprived of her home in Kyiv, so she was the one who came up with this idea of making the sportswear collection to fundraise money for children. Besides that, our team gave free access to every Ukrainian to our apps on the second day of the war and it was not easy because we were evacuating from Kyiv, everyone was somewhere in different situations.
But we decided that that was our mission to help people stay mentally stable and then one thing after another we launched a special chapter for children together with UNICEF Ukraine and with some psychologists. Also, we created some fairy tales for children and then we finally launched this collection.
How does it feel to know that you’re playing a big role in helping your country of Ukraine?
For the whole team I think and personally for me it’s very helpful to feel more mentally stable when you know that you can do something, that you can be a part of this big aim, these big things happening here because it’s very scary to be in this position to be honest because we can’t do anything to stop this war. Unfortunately, we are just people, and the only thing we can do is to work, is to raise money and to help affected people by our apps. So, it’s very, very helpful for us to be more mentally stable.
To donate to the Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal, visit the DEC (Disasters Emergency Committee): https://donation.dec.org.uk/ukraine-humanitarian-appeal
Written by Lucy Roberts for Female First, who you can follow on Twitter, @Lucy_Roberts_72.
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