Portland-based Mercy Corps sending team to help Ukraine

PORTLAND Ore. (KPTV) - With the crisis in Ukraine escalating, people are looking for help, and a Portland-based humanitarian aid group now has a team headed to Europe to assess how they can help Ukrainians.

The Ukrainian Bible Church in Fairview is planning an event Sunday evening to collect supplies, medicines and such to send to the Ukrainian Army and hospitals. That’s something Mercy Corps does regularly in times of conflict and natural disasters around the globe.

The Mercy Corps, which is headquartered in Portland, said they’ve helped hundreds of thousands of people in emergency situations in the past, but this time they estimate millions of people will need help.

The group doesn’t have people in the country at the moment, but a team is on the way to make an assessment of what kind of help Ukraine will need. Once the assessment is complete, Mercy Corps will send help in the hundreds.

“Water, food, shelter, healthcare. Often times in a complex emergency of this sort, Mercy Corps does cash program, which puts resources into the hands of displaced people who need it most. That way they can spend the money in places on what they need most and often times, that’s the most important thing we can do,” said Craig Redmond, Senior Vice President of Programs for Mercy Corps.

For two years, Mercy Corps helped about 200,000 people in Ukraine after their conflict with Russia in 2014. Trucking water is one of many things they have done to help villages in need, but Redmond said this time around it will be much bigger than before

Mercy Corps said their biggest worry is the civilians. Redmond said there are a lot of elderly people in the southeast region who have nowhere to go.

Anyone who would like to help and donate to Mercy Corps, click here.