Human rights protection, education, and advocacy: how the Podil Human Rights Center operates

Publication date: January 27, 2026

Author: Yuliia Bilyk, Communications Manager, Legal Development Network

The Podil Human Rights Center (hereinafter referred to as PHRC, Center) is a member organization of the Legal Development Network, which has been operating in the Vinnytsia oblast since 1995. Over the past 30 years, the team has gone from providing legal advice to conducting large-scale advocacy campaigns, expanding its reach to several other oblasts of Ukraine and earning an unquestionably positive reputation in local communities. GlobalGiving Support allows the organization to continue its work even when the war forces changes and specialists are scattered across different oblasts of the country.

Three decades of evolution

The organization was founded in the early years of Ukraine’s independence. In 1995, seven enthusiasts came together — professional lawyers and law students. The goal was simple: to provide legal assistance to people and thereby protect their rights.

“The organization was named ‘Podil Human Rights Center’ with the idea that we would talk about rights, people would know how to resolve various issues, and that would be the end of it. But very soon, within three to six months, we realized that this was not enough. People who received advice were only temporarily satisfied with it. Then, in their daily lives, they lacked the courage, education, and self-confidence to see things through to the end,” says Mykhailo Bardin, chairman of the board of the Podil Human Rights Center.

So the organization quickly expanded its activities. Representatives of the PHRC helped initiative groups form teams and register new public organizations. Between 1997 and 2001, thanks to the Center’s support, over 50 new public organizations were established and began their work. Among them were organizations for people with disabilities such as Parostok, Open Hearts, and Hope, the Nemyriv Union of Creative Initiatives, and the Podillya Association of Pensioners.

Advocacy results

One of the first advocacy campaigns undertaken by the NGO was aimed at saving art schools in Vinnytsia. In 1998, the Vinnytsia city authorities decided to reorganize the network of art education institutions. In the city center, in one of the old three-story mansions, there was a children’s music school No. 1. They wanted to turn the premises into an administrative or commercial building. The authorities announced the dismissal of all teaching staff from four art schools. Strike committees were formed among teachers at the second music school and art school.

In response to the events in the city, the Podil Human Rights Center conducted a study and compared the number of educational places per school-age child in Vinnytsia with other oblast centers — Odesa, Lviv, and Kyiv. It turned out that in Vinnytsia, there are fewer opportunities for schoolchildren to receive an arts education than in other oblast centers.

“The findings of the Podil Human Rights Center’s study became the main argument in favor of preserving all arts education institutions. The Vinnytsia City Council organized a round table discussion, inviting the directors of music schools, representatives of the strike committees, and our NGO. As a result, the order to lay off employees was canceled. Thus, we conducted a classic advocacy campaign, the result of which changed the decision of the authorities,” says Mykhailo Bardin.

The network of arts education institutions in Vinnytsia has been stable since 1998, and no one is raising the issue of its reduction anymore.

Another notable advocacy campaign took place in 2007 in the village of Turbiv. Local authorities decided to relocate the graves of World War II soldiers, which were located in a neglected old park that had been partially turned into a spontaneous garbage dump. Relocating the graves would remove the protected status of the area around the memorial in the park. This would allow the authorities to dispose of the park land at their discretion. Local residents opposed this decision. An initiative group began to guard the memorial area, preventing equipment from entering, and turned to the Podil Human Rights Center for support.

“After analyzing the situation, we decided to justify the residents of Turbiv’s demand to overturn the authorities’ decision. To this end, with the support of the International Renaissance Foundation, we researched the origins of the park. It turned out that it was created in the same era as the Sofiyivka Landscape Park in Uman, Cherkasy oblast,” says Mykhailo Bardin.

Scientists from the Sofiyivka Landscape Park came to Turbiv, took part in a round table with the village council, and presented the value of the park. This stopped the decision to build on the land. Next, the PHRC appealed to the Turbiv village council with an initiative to reserve 4.7 hectares of land for the Turbiv Park, a natural monument of local importance. The decision was approved.

Team and focus on communities

Today, the PHRC team consists of Chairman of the Board Mykhailo Bardin, Deputy Chairwoman of the Board Oksana Yatsyuk, Director of the NGO Volodymyr Dyman, Lawyer and Deputy Director Oleksandr Dovbysh, Accountant Olena Dovhopol, Community Representatives Volodymyr Pastushenko and Oksana Komisarenko, and Financial Expert Halyna Tuchynska.

In 2026, as in previous years, the Center’s team will focus on working in rural communities and district centers. The NGO is currently expanding its influence in the Vinnytsia, Chernivtsi, and Ivano-Frankivsk oblasts. In organizing its work to provide free legal consultations and conduct legal awareness events, the NGO works closely with local authorities.

Legal assistance

The key focus of the PHRC’s activities is free legal assistance. Every month, the team of lawyers provides over 100 legal consultations. Most of the requests concern military and inheritance law, as well as social protection of citizens. A separate set of requests comes from internally displaced persons who are currently trying to settle in the oblasts where the NGO operates. In particular, the Center assists displaced persons in partnership with the NGO “We Are from Ukraine” in the city of Storozhynets, Chernivtsi oblast. Recently, most requests from IDPs have concerned the registration of living allowances and “winter support” from the state.

The PHRC does not limit its assistance to providing clients with initial consultations. The NGO’s lawyers, who are also professional attorneys, identify and represent strategic cases in court—those that are of great importance for solving the problems of a specific category of people or community.

An example of a successful strategic case is the assistance provided in Vinnytsia to the council of gardening associations of the Salnyk cottage community. A group of raiders illegally changed the management of the complex by holding a meeting with violations. The legitimate managers appealed to the PHRC. The NGO’s lawyers prepared a lawsuit to the commercial court, which was upheld. The decision in favor of the clients has now been confirmed by the court of appeals.

Information security: Oksana Yatsyuk’s mission

A separate area of the NGO’s work is legal education on information security and countering fake news. This is handled by the deputy chair of the board, Oksana Yatsyuk.

“I have been working on information security since 2014. I see it as my mission. A decade ago, there was a noticeable lack of information on this topic. That’s why I started studying it and then sharing my knowledge,” says Oksana Yatsyuk, deputy chair of the PHRC board.

Oksana holds events almost every week in libraries and schools in towns and villages in the Vinnytsia oblast. Sometimes she initiates them herself, but more often she responds to requests from educational and cultural institutions that want to develop their target groups.

Over the years of in-depth study of the topic of information hygiene and security, Oksana Yatsyuk has accumulated a wealth of materials. Much of this material formed the basis of her book for middle school children, Your Internet: Secrets of Online Safety. Published by ASSA in 2025, the book is structured as a series of stories about fifth-grade students who find themselves in various situations online. These situations are quite common and reflect the digital reality in which children are growing up. Therefore, young readers will be able to recognize themselves in the book, and thanks to this, they will easily remember how to behave online in order to avoid danger.

According to Oksana Yatsyuk, the greatest danger for children on the Internet is the risk of trauma to their immature psyche. Hateful comments, bullying, and condemnation can be just as harmful as incredible success and admiration. After all, a page can be hacked, a blog can disappear, and tomorrow there may not be thousands of likes like there were yesterday. For a child’s psyche, such situations are a complete loss, the experience of which can be too painful.

Adult participants in the PCPL’s legal awareness events most often talk about clicking on phishing links and losing money, being pressured to buy goods over the phone, trusting advertisements on social media, and ordering poor-quality goods.

“One woman said that she had ‘kiwis’ growing in her flower garden. I asked her what kind of kiwis? It turns out that she had ordered two kiwi bushes online. Not one, but two — because it was cheaper. It turned out that they were actually ordinary rosehip bushes. The woman said, ‘I threw one pseudo-kiwi bush away, but left the other one in the flower garden to remind me of the situation I got myself into,’” Oksana Yatsyuk shares.

Legal awareness events are also an opportunity to tell more people that they can always turn to the Legal Development Network and get the legal advice they need.

“At all legal awareness events, I always emphasize that it is possible to get help from lawyers at no extra cost, that the Legal Development Network has an online chat, chatbot, and hotline. People actively take note of the contacts,” says Oksana Yatsyuk.

Working in dispersed conditions

Due to martial law, the LRC team is dispersed. Mykhailo Bardin currently lives in the Ivano-Frankivsk oblast, where he helps residents of the Kosiv district. He periodically travels to the city of Storozhynets in the Chernivtsi oblast to work with internally displaced persons in partnership with the NGO “We Are from Ukraine.”

Due to logistical difficulties, personal appointments with citizens at the organization’s office in Vinnytsia are only available by appointment. A large amount of legal assistance is provided by telephone and Viber, where people can describe their issues in detail and attach documents related to their cases.

GlobalGiving: an opportunity to keep going

GlobalGiving’s support for the organization is an opportunity to continue work that the Podil Human Rights Center would not have sufficient resources to do on its own. First and foremost, flexible funding makes it possible to cover the costs of traveling to remote communities.

“It’s 50 km from where I live to Storozhynets, but I have to make the round trip. The same applies to Oksana Yatsyuk’s legal awareness events: the journey is often long and expensive,” explains Mykhailo Bardin.

Funding for the charitable platform also allows us to pay for office rent in Vinnytsia, utilities, and office equipment upgrades. The Podil Human Rights Center also plans to update its organizational strategy, as the team has already stabilized in a state of dispersion.

The Podil Human Rights Center provides legal advice, protects people’s rights and promotes legal awareness, provides mentoring support to emerging civic initiatives, implements advocacy campaigns, and develops partnerships at various levels. The main goal of the organization is to continue this work and carry it out systematically. It may not be overly ambitious, but it is entirely achievable, despite all the challenges and obstacles caused by the war.

This material was created by the Legal Development Network with the support of the international charitable platform GlobalGiving. The content of this publication is the sole responsibility of the Legal Development Network.

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