Voices, Visions, Alliances: How Impact-Oriented Entrepreneurship Shapes Ukraine’s Resilient Recovery

Recently the team of Ukrainian Social Venture Fund took part in the annual conference “Voices, Visions, Alliances”, organised by the German Government’s Platform for the Recovery of Ukraine. The event created space for a deep—and at times challenging—conversation about what Ukraine’s recovery should look like: not only in physical terms, but also across social, economic, and human dimensions.

The conference brought together representatives of government, municipalities, civil society, research institutions, donors, and impact entrepreneurs. The focus was not on grand declarations, but on practical questions: how to reform institutions during wartime; how to support communities carrying disproportionate burdens; how to build energy and economic resilience; how to work with labour markets, migration, and return; and what role responsibly minded businesses play in this process.

From scaling for the sake of scaling to solutions rooted in communities

Within this framework, USVF—together with GIZ Ukraine and Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft—hosted a workshop on impact-oriented entrepreneurship. The central question of the session was not “how to scale,” but how to create solutions that retain their meaning under the pressure of investor expectations, war, and systemic crises.

A key insight emerged during the discussion: in Western contexts, impact investing is often reduced to the search for fast, universal models. Ukraine’s reality calls for a different approach—more careful, context-sensitive, grounded in public–private cooperation and a deep understanding of local needs.

For this reason, the workshop focused on bottom-up approaches, where communities, entrepreneurs, and local actors are not “beneficiaries,” but co-creators of solutions.

Three cooperation models already at work

During the session, the USVF team and partners presented three different yet complementary models illustrating how impact can take tangible form.

The first model is a public–private R&D partnership with Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft in the field of VR-based PTSD rehabilitation (the VRMentality project). This is not merely a technological innovation, but a transfer of applied science into a wartime context. Joint work by Ukrainian and German researchers and entrepreneurs opens pathways to solutions that can ease pressure on the mental health system while remaining commercially viable without losing their social mission.

The second model is municipal procurement of social impact, illustrated by the Bank of Memories case. This example shows how communities can act as active commissioners of social solutions, working with memory and support for families of the fallen. For the social enterprise, this creates a predictable revenue model; for communities, it ensures long-term social value.

The third model is a GIZ pilot focused on labour-market development at the community level, built through cross-sector collaboration. Its defining feature is a rejection of universal formulas. Each community is treated as a distinct ecosystem, shaped by different challenges: varying numbers of internally displaced persons, different business structures, and differing prospects for return. Solutions emerge through co-design involving local authorities, businesses, civil society organisations, and international partners.

Impact begins with people

Summing up the discussion, Olena Kalibaba, CEO of Ukrainian Social Venture Fund, highlighted a fundamental point:

“Our most important insight is simple: impact is always about people. That is why bottom-up approaches work best—especially in the Ukrainian context. Real impact begins where communities, entrepreneurs, and local actors are already responding to real needs.”

This idea ran through the entire session. In wartime conditions and with limited resources, the human dimension—trust, engagement, responsibility—determines whether an initiative becomes resilient or disappears once funding ends.

Alliances as the foundation of recovery

The “Voices, Visions, Alliances” conference once again demonstrated that Ukraine’s recovery is not the sum of individual projects. It is a process that requires alliances between institutions, businesses, communities, and international partners—alliances grounded in shared risk, experimentation, and collective learning.

Ukrainian Social Venture Fund sincerely thanks Plattform Wiederaufbau Ukraine for creating space for this kind of dialogue, as well as our partners and speakers—GIZ Ukraine, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, VRMentality, Bank of Memories—and the communities and entrepreneurs who are already proving that impact is not an abstraction, but daily work with real-world complexity.