A4R Feature — What stability looks like when everything else is moving. Taya's story.
A4R Media Hub | Featuring Taya Andreeva
AT A GALACE:
In April 2022, a 16-year-old from Ukraine applied to volunteer with BizGees via a platform called We Make Change. She listed her skills as business development, community management, marketing, and videography. Two weeks later, the war started. What followed — across four years, four countries, and one remarkable journey — is the story of what genuine, sustained support for a young displaced person actually looks like. In her own words and ours.
On 15 April 2022, a typeform notification landed in a BizGees inbox.
Name: Taya Andreeva. Location: Ukraine. Skills: Business Development, Community Management, Marketing, Videography. Motivation: I am very interested in this area and the possibility of new experience. I want to help the project develop and I will do everything in my power. I am also very talented and creative, I have an analytical mindset — so I think well.
She was 16. She already had a YouTube channel, multiple Instagram accounts, and a client she was running a promotion strategy for. She had applied, entirely on her own initiative, to volunteer with a social enterprise working with post-conflict communities — because she wanted new experience and believed she could contribute something real.
A week later, she was on a Google Meet call with Zufi. A week after that, the war in Ukraine had started.
Four countries. One consistent thread.
What happened next is the kind of story that doesn’t fit neatly into a programme outcome report.
Taya was displaced to Spain, where she was placed with a family and hoped to attend university. That didn’t work out, and she returned to Ukraine — continuing to volunteer with A4R Media Hub during the war, creating content, building skills, showing up week after week from a country under active conflict. Then an opportunity came to move to Ireland. She went, with her parents’ support, and was placed in accommodation with other refugee children.
She wanted to go straight to university. She missed the application deadline. Her English, while strong, needed more time to develop to the level university required. So she enrolled in a further education college instead — not the path she’d planned, but the right one. It built her language skills, her academic foundation, and her confidence. It opened the door to a degree in Design, Technology, and Marketing at university. She has now completed her second year and has just started her first formal internship — at BMW.
Across all of it — Spain, Ukraine during the war, Ireland, FE college, university — one thing didn’t change. A4R was there.
What A4R actually provided.
This is worth being specific about, because “support” is a word that can mean almost anything.
It didn’t mean a one-off introduction or a single mentoring session. It meant four years of continuity — of someone picking up the call, making the introduction, following up, and staying present across a journey that moved through multiple countries and multiple crises.
During her time with A4R, Taya created digital content for the Media Hub — videos for the website, visuals and creatives for social media. Here is an example of a marketing video for our merchandise she created.
She worked alongside student volunteers from Oxford University and King’s College London, interviewing some of them and collaborating with others — giving her a lived understanding of what university life might feel like, long before she got there herself. She was introduced to tech experts in Ireland who helped her settle into life locally. She was connected with multiple mentors — one in Ireland, two in London — who helped her develop her skills at critical points in her journey.
This is a short interview she gave to a GenZ Viber she was working with.
And she designed the current A4R Media Hub logo. The one you see on arts4refugees.com. The one that has appeared on every piece of content in this series. Made by a 16-year-old Ukrainian refugee, volunteering from a country at war, for an organisation that believed in what she could do before she had any of the credentials to prove it.
In Her Own Words
Volunteering with BizGees and Arts4Refugees became one of the most meaningful experiences of my journey. What started as an opportunity to gain new skills and contribute to social projects became something much more personal — a place where I found support, connection, and people.
During my time volunteering, I was mainly involved in creating digital content, including videos for the website and visuals/creatives for social media. I enjoyed using my creativity to help share the organisation’s work and stories with a wider audience. This experience allowed me to improve my skills in content creation, visual storytelling, and communication while working on projects with a meaningful purpose.
Another valuable part of this experience was meeting other student volunteers from different backgrounds. Working together helped me develop my teamwork and communication skills, while also allowing me to learn from people with different perspectives and experiences.
Beyond the professional skills I gained, BizGees became an important source of personal support during a very challenging period of my life. After the beginning of the war in Ukraine, I experienced many changes and relocations, which was emotionally difficult. The founder of BizGees provided me with a lot of encouragement and moral support during this time, showing kindness and understanding when I needed it most.
One of the most special moments was when he introduced me to an amazing woman in Ireland who later became an important connection in my life after I moved there and started university. And also a wonderful marketing mentor in London, who was a great support as well and a very nice person to know and meet. This showed me that volunteering is not only about the work you do — it is also about the relationships you build and the people who become part of your journey.
My experience with BizGees and Arts4Refugees taught me that creativity can bring people together and that even small contributions can have a meaningful impact. I am grateful for the opportunity to have been part of these organisations and for the people I met along the way. The experience helped me grow both professionally and personally and reminded me of the importance of kindness, community, and human connection.
— Taya Andreeva, Viber, A4R Media Hub
What this says about A4R.
Taya’s story is not exceptional because of what A4R did. It’s exceptional because of how long A4R did it.
Most programmes have a defined intervention window — a course, a placement, a mentoring cycle. They are built for emergencies, or for a single transition, and they end when the emergency does or the transition is complete. What Taya needed — and what very few organisations are structured to provide — was something much simpler and much harder: someone who would still be there next month, regardless of which country she was in.
That’s what stability looks like during displacement. Not a fixed address. Not a guaranteed outcome. The presence of people who keep showing up — who make the introduction, follow up on it, and ask how it went. Who believe in what you can do before you have the portfolio to prove it. Who let a 16-year-old design a logo that ends up representing the organisation for years.
Taya is now at BMW. Her logo is still on the website. And she is, at the time of writing, working on her blog post for the Media Hub — in her own words, in her own time, on her own terms.
That’s the whole point of this.
About A4R Feature
A4R Feature is a series of long-form pieces published by the Arts4Refugees Media Hub, telling the stories of the individuals whose journeys have shaped the organisation. Each piece is told in collaboration with the person at its centre.
If you have a story connected to A4R, BizGees, or the communities we work with, we’d like to hear from you.
A4R Feature — What stability looks like when everything else is moving — was produced by A4R Media Hub in collaboration with Taya Andreeva. Her words appear exactly as she wrote them.
Thank you for reading an A4R 🎨 Post. Don’t forget to visit our gaming art here. Every purchase scales our impact and pays our bills.
