VIDEO EXCLUSIVE

Exclusive Insights: Interview with Paul Niland – Founder and Director of Lifeline Ukraine

Kyiv Post is introducing a regular new section – Exclusive Insights. It will contain interviews, transcripts, and video, with prominent people from the business world, politics, the arts, science, technology, and IT.

The following is the full transcript of the conversation with Paul Niland:

Bohdan Nahaylo: I’m happy to welcome to our next installment of Exclusive Insights a friend of mine, Paul Niland. An Irishman, one of the colourful active figures on the Ukrainian scene for many, many years, a publisher, writer, businessman, activist. And, right now, he’s heading a very important organization called Lifeline Ukraine. Paul Niland. Tell us about Lifeline Ukraine. How it came about?

Paul Niland: Lifeline Ukraine is our national suicide prevention hotline. It’s been in existence now for close to two and a half years since we opened, which was on the 14th of October 2019, a great day that I remember very, very well. The reason we opened on that day is because that is Defender’s Day in Ukraine. And, specifically, our first mission was to provide a support service for Ukraine’s veterans, for the people who have gone to the Donbas to defend Ukrainian territory. And, you know, any country that has to send troops to war, they know that there’s always going to be a psychological toll on them as a result of their service. And so, I was charged with this mission, I was given the responsibility to build Lifeline Ukraine, and I looked around the world, specifically, at suicide prevention hotlines for veterans and how they work, and realized that the best approach to helping veterans is a peer-to-peer support structure. So, I hired a bunch of veterans. But not only veterans, in fact, I also have a lot of psychologists in the team as well. But interestingly, the veterans have an interest in psychology, and the psychologists have an interest in veterans’ affairs, right? So, they kind of sit on both stools.

B.N: May I just ask you before we get into the details of what you actually do. Are you suggesting that there was a gap before then? That the war had been going on, what, for five years already or so, and that this was a neglected area?

P.N: There most certainly was a gap, not only with regard to the specifics of the question that with the war ongoing for five years. The gap, in actual fact, is that Ukraine never had a suicide prevention hotline until now. And Lifeline Ukraine has evolved – we’re not there specifically for the veteran community anymore, although that’s who we best served, best prepared to serve. But Lifeline Ukraine is available for anybody experiencing tough emotional times, regardless of their background. We get calls from younger people, for example, maybe, having stress from studies, or from their love life. We get calls from older people, who are maybe lonely. So, Lifeline Ukraine is there for absolutely anybody.

B.N: Can you give me an idea of the numbers that we are talking about when you started and now?

P.N: So, here’s some numbers to demonstrate the gap that I was just talking about, and then I’ll come back to the specifics of Lifeline Ukraine. The suicide prevention hotline in the UK has been in existence for 50 years. The Irish analogy has been in existence for 60 years. And Ukraine just never had one. So, this needed to happen, first and foremost, for the veterans, but absolutely for the country, for Ukraine, for anybody who needs it. So, the specifics of Lifeline Ukraine, in the next few days we cross a new landmark, a new milestone number that we will have received 19,000 individual requests for support. 19,000, either calls that come into our call centre through the number 7333, or chats, because we’re active through the website, through Facebook, we provide consultations through chats as well. A lot of younger people, for example, prefer that, they prefer to write. So yes, 19,000 times my colleagues have answered at all times of day and night. I mean, we’re there 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

B.N: How do the people find out about your existence and where to phone?

P.N: We are… From the very beginning, I knew that we needed a solid social media awareness campaign, and so I hired specialists in that area, and then it was about establishing our reputation and growing the reputation of Lifeline Ukraine by word of mouth. And we’ve done that because of the incredible work that my colleagues do with each and every call. We have a rule, actually… Well, not a rule, but an ethos, a way of thinking – Lifeline Ukraine operates under the rule of one, and it’s one call, one person, and it’s the next one, that’s what we’re waiting for, we’re waiting for the next call. And so, I can say 19,000, that’s the threshold that we’re about to cross, but what matters is the next person who calls us, the next person who seeks our support. That’s what we focus on. And this, I get excited when I talk about this, there’s a really cool thing between my colleagues that there’s a competition between them – who’s going to answer the phone. As soon as the phone rings, it’s like Pavlov’s dogs, you know, the kind of reaction. They rush to be the person who takes that next call, not knowing what’s going to unfold, not knowing what situation is going to present itself. They want to be the first one, each of them go – I’ve got it! I’m taking it!

B.N: So, people are calling in Ukrainian and Russian. Tell me, what the average call, how long do you spend on-line with a caller, and are you offering them psychological counselling, or are you giving them addresses, pointing them to places where they can get further help?

P.N: We do a lot of onward referrals including to places where people can get psychological support. But what we do, and it is no one average call, because within a situation where a person finds themself having the worst day of their life, and they need to call something like Lifeline Ukraine, there’s usually a complex set of problems. It’s not just one particular thing, it’s a number of things. So, we have a lot of resources that we can direct people to. It might be legal assistance, we often find ourselves talking to people who are having financial problems, and, you know, people who are having relationship problems. There’re many reasons, and I mentioned, you know, loneliness earlier on as well. And about Russian and Ukrainian, one day I was reading the report of the previous day’s calls, and I saw a word in Ukrainian – samotnist’ – that I didn’t recognize, and I said to my colleagues – what is this? And they know that I speak Russian better, so they translated – odinochestvo. And I said – I still don’t understand it, what is it, just in English?

B.N: You being on your own.

P.N: Loneliness, loneliness. And, you know, we’re there for people with all kinds of circumstances. There’s no average call, because we’re dealing with a human, their very personal set of circumstances that are facing them.

B.N: What’s the age breakdown? Evenly balanced, or more older people, or more younger people?

P.N: We’re very evenly balanced in terms of gender breakdown. We’re almost 50-50 between the number of calls we get from men or from women. In terms of age, we don’t ask the personal details from people, one of the principles that we have is anonymity, but if somebody wants to share those details then we can record it, but it ranges massively, it’s literally anybody. It can be, as I said, a younger person, a student, it can be a pensioner, it’s the entire range of age groups, and across the entire country as well. I did a breakdown at one time, looking at regions where we’ve had calls from, and we literally touch every single corner of Ukraine, including Crimea as well, by the way. We’ve had calls from Crimea.

B.N: Do you get calls from cranks, or from people with mental illness, who are… just want to talk or abuse this system?

P.N: We do get calls like that. It’s something that takes up resources, but it’s a part of running an operation like this. There’re going to be people who want to waste time, but, you know, we’ve had very few of those kind of people. We do have people who are regular callers, who call us frequently because they genuinely need help and support, and we’re there to provide that for them.

B.N: Resources – how are you funded?

P.N: So, the establishment of Lifeline Ukraine came with a grant from the British embassy, first of all, and then the second grant came from the State Department via an organization called IREX, and then we had this small grant from the European Union too. And what I’m currently doing is, I’m only going to do this once. I’ve got a longer-term plan, but I’m currently using all of my own personal contacts within the business community, and I’m raising money, 300,000 dollars, in actual fact, which is the equivalent of our annual operating cost – 300,000 dollars. So, I’m raising money from the business community in chunks of 10,000 dollars, and it was an idea that a friend of mine came up with, and she said to me – ‘Look, you need 300,000 dollars, break it down, it’s 30 donations of 10,000 each.’ And I’m very, very grateful to the Kyiv Post for being a participant in this collective fundraising effort, which I called our angels program. You were in actual fact, the eighth angel, the eighth heart that I’ve put on the board. We’ve since then added a ninth as well, which is the Australian embassy here in Kyiv, we had a small grant from them. We were joined, first of all, after our initial five donations of 10,000 dollars, we were then joined by Winner and an accountancy firm called Baker Tilly, Kyiv Post, the Australian embassy. I’m hoping to add a tenth one in the coming days, and then we’re one-third of the way to the goal. And so, we’ve got momentum with us, and I want to keep on using my contacts, my relationships with the business community to get us to that goal, and then what I’m going to do, the longer-term plan, and this was a conversation that started back in the summer of last year. Somebody said to me that you need an endowment, and so, the money that I’m raising with the angels program, it gives me time, then, to raise an endowment, and we will have a large sum of money, and we will live annually off the interest that we get from our investments from that capital sum. And Lifeline Ukraine will be as it should be. It will be here forever, because it must be here forever.

B.N: Have you had an impact on others of analogous bodies, NGOs started up, anybody followed your example, or are you still on your own, blazing the trail, as it were?

P.N: In terms of suicide prevention, we are the only one, and nobody needs to follow our example, nobody needs to, you know, set up a similar kind of operation. When I started with Lifeline Ukraine, you know, you start a new project, you take a blank sheet of paper, right, and the very first words that I wrote were best international standards. Right? And I researched around the world, I looked at the United States, Israel, Denmark, all over the world, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and I made sure that what I was creating was going to operate to the best international practices, and that’s what we do. So, we’re not only in this field, we would be the leader in this field anyway if someone else came along. Nobody needs to repeat this now.

B.N: Ok, to conclude. Well, key messages, what would you like to convey to the audience as they think about this very worthy work that you’re doing?

P.N: Key message number one is we save lives. Not every call that we take, in line with similar operations in other countries, not every call that we take is a crisis call, where suicide, potentially, is imminent, but every single call that we take is somebody having the worst day of their life and not knowing where to turn to. So, we save lives, but every single instance of support is vitally important to that person right now. That’s number one. Number two, another conversation with a good friend of mine, when we won our second grant from the State Department, he’s a Ukrainian businessman, he looked at me and he said – it’s brilliant that the international community supports this, but we should do this, the community of businesses here, in Ukraine, is what should fund Lifeline Ukraine. And so, that’s precisely what I’m doing, and so that the third key message would have to be, if your business has space in your corporate social responsibility budget, as The Kyiv Post has found, please support Lifeline Ukraine. And you know, these 10,000 dollar donations, I broke it down and I looked at our cost per intervention, and if our running cost is 25,000 dollars per month, 300,000 dollars per year, then that means that each individual instance of help costs 25 dollars. So, our 10,000 dollar donor helps 400 people. That is the measurable, demonstrable impact of each of these donations to the angel programme – you help 400 people – and that’s a great thing to be able to say that you did, when those people are in times of crisis.

B.N: Paul, thank you very much for this very inspiring and informative presentation, and we wish you luck and hope to be able to support you in our own way.

P.N: Thank you, Bohdan!

Video by Kyiv Post