Our work

Working with Ashoka Polska

Rotary Club Warszawa-Belweder has begun working with Ashoka Polska, helping to find and recommend candidates for the international Ashoka Fellows network.

The cooperation is part of Ashoka's wider work on building a community of social leaders in Ukraine. The organisation wants to draw on the experience of its global network of thousands of social entrepreneurs in order to support people who create lasting, systemic solutions to social problems, and to strengthen civil society in the rebuilding and development of Ukraine.

Our Club's role is to use its own network of contacts, the experience of its members and its relationships in Poland and Ukraine to identify people whose work may meet the Ashoka Fellows criteria.

We look above all for leaders who not only run worthwhile projects, but create solutions that can be developed and replicated, who have the potential to bring about lasting social change and who can bring others together around their ideas.

The Club's recommendation is the beginning of the process. Candidates then go through a multi-stage assessment run by Ashoka, covering an analysis of their work, interviews, and an appraisal of their impact and their potential to create systemic change.

TeenSoNa — support for teenagers in everyday difficulties

Rotary Club Warszawa-Belweder works with the Jobian Social Foundation on the development of TeenSoNa — a multilingual tool that supports teenagers aged 10–16 in coping with everyday social and emotional situations.

TeenSoNa grew out of an idea by Mark Chubenko, who at twelve had to leave Ukraine after the war began and start his life and schooling in a new country. From his own experience he saw how hard it is for teenagers to find their place in a new environment, to understand social relationships and to ask for help. In 2024 he began work on the project, and in 2026 the earlier Telegram prototype grew into a standalone Android application.

The application leads a young person through real situations from six areas of life: home, school, the internet, relationships with peers, first romantic relationships and their own emotions. The user does not have to describe their problem — they pick situations from ready-made options and then receive several possible ways of responding, together with the likely consequences.

The content is prepared and checked by child psychologists. The project deliberately does not use generative AI to produce advice for young people, contains no adult–child chats and was designed with the emphasis on anonymity and on users' safety.

The current version runs on Android and supports four languages: English, Polish, Ukrainian and Russian.

The next stage includes developing the content, school pilots, measuring well-being with WHO-5 and preparing an iOS version.

LanGuide — language, integration and new social roles

Rotary Club Warszawa-Belweder, together with the Ukraińska Wspólnota Foundation, supports the development of the LanGuide model — an innovative approach in which blind and partially sighted people act as language and social guides for migrants and refugees from Ukraine.

The project draws on the strengths of people with a visual impairment, among them a well-developed ear for phonetics and experience of working with audio tools, in order to support participants not only in learning Polish, but also in better understanding the culture, everyday situations and life in a new setting. At the same time blind and partially sighted people gain the chance to develop new skills, to take a greater part in social life and to build a career.

Educational materials have already been produced, language and social guides trained, and courses run for refugees from Ukraine. In the Language Guides for a Good Start project, more than 50 people from Ukraine received support and 8 new guides with a visual impairment were trained.

The next stage is to develop the model in several directions: training new language and social guides, creating the digital LanGuides 2.0 courses, testing new educational materials and building a wider ecosystem for the activation and employment of people with disabilities. The project also envisages further promotion of a model of mutual support between two groups at risk of social exclusion.

In their new form the courses are to combine learning Polish with cultural, psychological and digital elements and to use modern ICT tools to create more interactive ways of learning.