From Kroměříž to Litomyšl: How Czech Grassroots Women’s Organizations Are Building A Lasting Welcome
Three years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the organizations that stepped up in the earliest days of the crisis are still here – not running emergency programs, but building something longer-term: genuine community.
Network for Family – the umbrella organization of Mother Centers in the Czech Republic – and a member of the Huairou Commission brings together local grassroots women’s groups across the Czech Republic in exactly this kind of sustained, locally led work. Two of its member centers – Klubíčko Kroměříž and the Rodinné Centrum Litomyšl – offer a window into what grassroots solidarity looks like in practice.
Klubíčko Kroměříž: Friendship as Infrastructure
The “Klub Společně” (Together Club) conducts activities to connect Czech and Ukrainian families.
When Ukrainian families began arriving in the small city of Kroměříž in spring 2022, Klubíčko responded quickly – with a playroom, language courses, clothes drives, and integration support. Over time, those services have evolved into something harder to name and more valuable: trust.
“They are grateful, often tired, and over time have become our friends,” the team writes. “It is this connection, and the trust we share, that keeps us committed.“
Today, all their Ukraine-related activities run under Klub Společně – the Together Club – which brings Czech and Ukrainian families into shared spaces rather than parallel ones. Creative workshops around Czech and Ukrainian holidays, community trips to museums and nature sites, summer camps for both communities’ children: the programming is deliberately integrative, not just supportive.
The difference shows up in participants’ own words. Yevgenia, a Ukrainian woman with a university degree, credits Klubíčko not just with language help but with a new professional direction – and a decision to build her future in the Czech Republic.
Rodinné Centrum Litomyšl: Singing Across the Divide
In Litomyšl, the Mother Center’s flagship response to the crisis has taken a more unexpected form: a choir.
Sonjašnyk – the Ukrainian word for sunflower – is a Czech-Ukrainian women’s choir that meets weekly to rehearse songs from both cultures. Since the war began, it has given over 40 concerts and raised several million crowns for relief efforts on both sides of the border: medical supplies, generators, and food for Ukraine; flood relief and support for disabled children and people with multiple sclerosis in Czechia.
But the choir’s impact isn’t only material. For Ukrainian members, it offers a way through isolation, a gentle path to learning Czech, and a space to grieve, connect, and feel that their identity is being honored – not erased. One participant put it plainly: “Sonjašnyk saves my life, without singing and without it, I would have been gone a long time ago.”
For the Czech community, it’s offered something too: the kind of close, story-rich encounter that shifts how people think about displacement and what it means to belong.
Sonjašnyk – a Czech-Ukrainian female choir
What Klubíčko Kroměříž and the Rodinné Centrum Litomyšl share – and what the Network for Families as a network embodies – is a conviction that integration is a relational process and not just a bureaucratic one. It happens in playrooms and rehearsal spaces, on road trips and around holiday tables. It takes time, volunteers, and the willingness to stay even when the emergency feeling has faded.
The war is not over. But in these two towns, women are coming together to build something sturdy and lasting. And across the Huairou Commission’s global network, stories like these are a reminder that in moments of crisis, it is often grassroots women – working with the resources they have, in the communities they know – who show the rest of the world what it looks like to truly welcome a neighbor.
Want to learn more? Visit www.klubickokm.cz and pomoc-ua.cz/sonjasnyk..