The all-volunteer Teachers for Ukraine initiative connects English language teachers and speaking partners from around the world with adult Ukrainians affected by the war for one hour per week of free, one-on-one, online language instruction, practice, and moral support.
Each volunteer is paired with an adult Ukrainian student for individualized online lessons. All teachers are responsible for assessing their students’ needs and for preparing appropriate teaching materials. Our goal is to use our knowledge and skills as English language educators to help Ukrainians in need and to show our support for Ukraine.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Please note that we are not a formal organization, but an informal volunteer teacher initiative run by one teacher, Kalina Papadimitriou in Canada, with the support of Dr. Marty Pilott in New Zealand. Together, we are an informal international community of hundreds of volunteer teachers and speaking partners supporting Ukraine. We do not have any funding and we do not accept any donations. We stand with Ukraine. We stand for peace.

Our students are adult Ukrainians affected by the ongoing war in Ukraine - both refugees and Ukrainians still living in Ukraine. Most of our students are well educated professionals at various levels of English language proficiency, from Pre Intermediate to Upper Intermediate level. They are journalists, teachers, artists, lawyers, doctors, architects, managers, accountants, IT specialists, academics, economists, scientists, engineers, university students, etc. - wonderful people and motivated learners from all walks of life.
We only offer online lessons to adult students – no children or minors.

We do not advertise for students - they come to us primarily through word of mouth.

Between April, 2022 and September, 2023, we have registered and paired with teachers more than 1,000 adult Ukrainians.

Our community of volunteer teachers consists of professional English language educators who hail from all over the world. We welcome all qualified and experienced TESOL professionals - both native and non-native speakers alike.
Our volunteer community also includes volunteer speaking partners – professionals from various fields who provide helpful language practice in a safe and positive environment, practical English language skills and knowledge, pronunciation practice, and much needed confidence-building support to their Ukrainian students.

Between April, 2022 and September, 2023, we have registered and paired with Ukrainian students more than 800 volunteer teachers and more than 150 speaking partners from 62 countries around the world.

The type of support we offer is not something that lasts a few weeks only. We expect our volunteers to commit to working with their students for a longer period since the lessons are only once a week and our students need continuous support with their English. Moreover, the students form an important bond with their teachers and speaking partners, which provides them with additional emotional support in the difficult times they are going through, and interrupting that bond too soon and too often just adds more distress to their already disrupted lives.

Currently, most of our Ukrainian students are in Europe, which means they might be in a very different time zone from that of their teachers. Since we do not have the capacity to match teachers and students according to individual availability, we ask the teachers to negotiate a convenient time for their lessons directly with their individual students. Our expectation is for the students to be flexible and to accommodate their teachers' schedules as much as possible.

We do not follow a specific curriculum with specific teaching materials because our adult students all have different needs and goals - their ages range from 18 to 60+, some are still in Ukraine, others are refugees (mostly in Europe), some are trying to adapt to living in an English-speaking environment, others need to improve their English in order to get new jobs or enter university, yet others just need a welcome psychological distraction and escape from the ongoing war. And since students and teachers work individually, teachers have the freedom to be creative and flexible and adjust their teaching and materials to their specific students with their specific needs.

However, we do provide support to our volunteer teachers and speaking partners:

• The ERPI publishing house in Montreal, Canada, is generously giving all our active volunteer teachers free access to a number of their wonderful digital ELT teaching materials. You will be given access to these materials at the time you receive your assigned student’s details.
• We have a live google file with an extensive list of free online teaching resources and materials collected by our volunteer teachers that we share with all our active teachers and speaking partners.
• In addition to that, if a volunteer has any questions or concerns, or if they need any extra materials, they can always post in our Facebook group, Teachers for Ukraine, and they will get plenty of help and support from the other volunteer teachers there, or they can write directly to Dr. Marty Pilott, who oversees our academic support.

Our volunteers commit to only one hour of online language instruction per week. However, each teacher can guide their student to study on their own between classes by providing them with free self-study materials and/or homework.

The all-volunteer Teachers for Ukraine initiative was created in March, 2022 by Kalina Slavova Papadimitriou, a Bulgarian teacher of English currently living in Quebec, Canada. Kalina is the initiative’s first volunteer teacher and its volunteer administrator. In just over a year, Teachers for Ukraine went from one teacher and one Ukrainian student to more than 800 volunteer teachers and more than 150 volunteer speaking partners from 62 countries around the world, and more than 1,000 Ukrainian students. Kalina’s hope is for this initiative to connect its participants not only as teachers and students studying English together - as important as this is for our Ukrainian students, the majority of whom are recent refugees in the UK - but also, as friends supporting and encouraging each other in this particularly difficult time for the Ukrainian people. As Goran Personn, the former Swedish Prime Minister once eloquently said: “... we will be there for one another as fellow members of humanity, in the finest sense of the word."