E=mc²: The Formula No Humanitarian Mandate Teaches

By Vitalii Zakharchuk, UN Ukraine RCO Senior National PSEA Coordinator.

Sixteen years in civil society and twelve in humanitarian work have taught me one thing: whenever a society treats vulnerable groups as a burden, it loses. People with disabilities, veterans, internally displaced people, LGBTQI+ community members — all of them usually get filed under “aid recipients.” A donor requires that they be “included,” a service organization “focuses on their needs,” and the system keeps treating this work as a cost line rather than an investment.

For years I have explained the opposite to colleagues using Einstein’s school formula. E equals m times c squared. E is energy, the outcome: a strong, resilient community where everyone can reach their potential. m is mass — in my analogy, that means people, every resident of a community, including those we label vulnerable. In physics, even a gram of matter hides enormous energy. In society, every person hides potential that usually stays invisible only because of the barriers around them. And c squared is the accelerator: accessible infrastructure, absence of discrimination, trust, equal opportunity. That is what turns a community’s passive mass into active energy for development.

In practice, it looks like this. A traditional approach sees a person with a disability as a budget line. An inclusive approach understands that removing a barrier turns that same person — from a benefit recipient — into a taxpayer, a volunteer, an idea generator, an active citizen. A ramp or a low-floor bus is not only for a wheelchair user. Mothers with strollers, older people, injured passengers, couriers with heavy bags all use it too. One accessibility feature raises mobility for several groups at once, and that is the entire point of the c² accelerator.

There is another effect people rarely mention: social synergy. In physics, splitting a nucleus triggers a chain reaction. In a community, integrating different people creates new connections. When business, government, activists, and people with different lived experience sit at the same decision-making table, unconventional and genuinely workable solutions emerge. That is not a slogan — it is something I have watched happen while coordinating the PSEA network in Ukraine.

The question I get most often is some version of: is inclusion even possible right now, when there are fewer resources, less time, less safety? My answer stays the same. Inclusion does not compete with a community’s survival for the same resource — it is how that resource stops being lost. When a community excludes part of its people from decision-making, it simply writes off part of the mass m in its own formula, then wonders why there is less energy than there could have been. War does not cancel this arithmetic. It only raises the cost of the mistake: a person who was not heard before 2022 is now much harder to find, because they may have fled, lost their documents, or ended up under occupation.

Formal inclusion, and what it fails to see

War does not create the problem of formal inclusion. It exposes it.

Ukraine has building codes meant to make premises accessible to people with disabilities. On paper, everything looks flawless. In practice, I regularly see a ramp built at an angle no one can climb unassisted, or an entrance that technically meets the code but with doors so heavy, because of that same code, that a wheelchair user cannot open them alone.

Here is another example of how formal compliance stays blind to a person’s actual experience. Rooms for feeding and changing infants are traditionally placed only inside women’s restrooms. A father holding a baby simply has no such room available to him. Inclusion exists in the label on the door, not in the logic behind it.

Sometimes it works the other way around. In Lviv, and later in the office of a humanitarian organization in Kyiv, I saw restrooms made gender-neutral and, due to the building’s own technical limits, wheelchair-accessible at the same time. They had also placed a set of period and hygiene supplies there. No loud statements about inclusivity, no report about “vulnerable group engagement.” Just a decision made by people who thought about how a real person would use that space, not an abstract beneficiary from a project proposal.

The difference between these examples is the actual test of whether inclusion works. A standard in a document guarantees nothing. What matters is whether anyone actually walked the path of the person the standard was written for.

The same holds for wartime humanitarian programming. A heating point can meet every Sphere standard and still be unreachable for a wheelchair user if the only entrance has a 15-centimeter step. A payment notice can be translated into several languages and still be useless to a person with a hearing impairment if the only channel is a loudspeaker in the square. Formal compliance and real accessibility are not the same thing, and the gap between them is visible only to someone who checks the outcome itself, not the report about it.

When inclusion becomes a matter of dignity, not paperwork

Two years ago, I had surgery, and during my rehabilitation my abdominal muscles were supported only by a corset for a long time. I started getting around Kyiv in that condition and realized, for the first time, just how painful and difficult it was — not in an abstract sense, but physically. On the subway, passersby who were simply in a hurry would bump into my stomach. Once, an event was held on the “minus one” floor of a hotel, and I had to navigate the steep stairs leading there on my own. Offices, hotels, public venues, and institutions all proclaim inclusivity on their websites. But almost none of them put this into practice, because none of the people writing these statements had any idea what it means to move around when something in your body is not working the way it should.

That is where inclusion stops being a word in a project report. It becomes a question of whether a person gets through the day without pain and humiliation.

SEAH: why vulnerability is always about power

SEAH — sexual exploitation, abuse, and harassment — in a humanitarian context is, above all, about a balance of power. Not in the military sense, but in the sense of authority and dependency. The more vulnerable a person or group is, the greater the power asymmetry becomes between them and whoever controls the resources.

That dependency has a direct, almost mechanical logic. A person who has lost their home, belongings, and documents sees a humanitarian worker as the sole “gatekeeper” to basic goods: food, shelter, cash assistance. The fewer alternative lifelines a person has, the stronger that dependency, and the fewer levers they have to defend their rights if something goes wrong.

That is why the “Leave No One Behind” principle, inside the UN system’s presence in Ukraine, is not a declaration but an integration rule underpinning humanitarian response and recovery programming.

The same logic runs through EU integration programming. But a rule on paper and a rule in practice — this is, once again, the gap between form and substance described above.

I have an exercise I sometimes use in SOGIESC trainings: imagine waking up in a different body, like in a body-swap film. What do you feel in the first few seconds? The question sounds naive, but it exposes the most common mistake in the sector — decisions about vulnerable groups are usually made by people who understand their problems in a stereotypical way, not from the inside, behind closed doors, without a single representative of the community being discussed.

The line between genuine participation and tokenism runs through authority, not rhetoric. A box-ticking consultation looks like this: an organization gets invited to a meeting, gets listened to, gets thanked, gets photographed for the report — and the program keeps running exactly as it was designed before that conversation. Sometimes it is even honestly labeled a “stakeholder consultation” in a project’s logical framework, and the community-engagement box is formally checked. But ask the meeting’s participants a month later what actually changed in the program because of what they said, and there is often no answer.

Genuine participation looks different. A Community-Based Organization can step in and change a program that is already running if it sees that program causing harm or simply failing, even if that program is already funded with an approved budget. It can influence a funding decision in favor of one direction over another, not just a wording choice in a project description. The difference is simple: in the first case, a Community-Based Organization gets consulted; in the second, it gets a veto or a real vote where previously only the donor and the implementing agency decided. If nothing structurally changes after a meeting with a community organization, that was not participation — it was a show.

Activism deserves a retirement plan too

One point I keep pressing in conversations with colleagues: the humanitarian sector is used to inviting the same people to meetings, consultations, panels. The same experts, the same faces since 2014 and 2015. We do this without any bad intent, simply because it is easier and safer — vetted contacts, a familiar level of English, a familiar way of presenting.

But activism, like any other field, needs a natural generational turnover. Look at how many genuine civil-society leaders have actually grown over the past decade, how many of them we helped grow ourselves, and how many we simply used year after year without investing in whoever comes next. Between 2005 and 2015, institutions invested in specific people, and those people became the backbone of the civil society we work with today. The question is who replaces them if we keep turning exclusively to leaders who are already established.

“Growing new leaders” operates on two levels at once, and they are connected. It means leaders from within vulnerable communities themselves — a person with a disability or an LGBTQI+ community member who, over time, becomes the voice of their own group inside the network rather than remaining an object of someone else’s representation. And it means the next generation of PSEA and gender specialists more broadly, people who arrive with different experience and different expectations of the work.

The new generation of activists and volunteers differs from the previous one, and here I will admit my own bias: they are not willing to spend their personal capacity on administration and micromanagement the way we got used to doing. They want to put a hundred percent of their energy into generating new products and solutions, not into reporting for reporting’s sake. One could read this as a weakness. I think it is worth reading as a different, and often more effective, allocation of resource — one the system simply needs to learn to accommodate.

The two levels of leadership development feed each other quite literally, not just in theory. When someone from the LGBTQI+ community joins the network having walked the path from beneficiary to advocacy specialist themselves, they bring something no external training can provide: precise knowledge of exactly where the system breaks for people with their experience. And conversely, when a young PSEA specialist builds their expertise not from a textbook case study but from direct dialogue with such leaders, their professional growth happens faster and more honestly than mine did twelve years ago.

What actually gets in the way, and why it is not money

Ask what the biggest structural obstacle is, and the easiest answer is: Community-Based Organizations funding, UN bureaucracy, wartime security constraints. All of these are real barriers. But the hardest thing to shift is not money — it is the system’s willingness to change and to compromise.

It matters not to confuse compromise with defeat. There is almost always a strategy where both sides win, where the international organization does not lose control over quality and accountability, and the local initiative does not lose its own identity and pace of work. But that first requires admitting that the current power distribution between a donor and a local organization is not neutral by default.

The practical side of that compromise is usually simple, and at the same time, uncomfortable for a large system. Shrink a reporting template to the size a CBO can actually fill in without a dedicated administrator on staff. Accept a less polished report submitted on time over a flawless one submitted two months late. Give an organization with a team of three the same voice at a coordination meeting as an agency with a hundred staff. None of these changes require additional funding, only a willingness to redistribute what already exists.

One piece of advice, when a donor or agency asks where to start: put on the shoes and walk your beneficiary’s path. Not figuratively, literally — reach the distribution point by the same route a person with a disability or a mother with a child would take. Fill out the same feedback form someone without internet access would have to fill out. Stand in the line that gets described in reports as “a minor service delay.”

That alone removes half the questions about why a program does not work the way it was designed to on paper.

A network the abuser will fear

People sometimes ask how I picture the PSEA Network Ukraine three to five years from now, if the approach of inclusion plus genuine Community-Based Organizations leadership actually takes hold. My answer is fairly specific.

It is a network controlled by local organizations, not an international structure that merely consults them. It will have the backing of the international community, but weight and a mandate strong enough that every person in Ukraine understands: if you turn to this network, you will genuinely be protected. And an abuser, whoever they are, understands that a real consequence awaits them, not a formal letter asking them to explain themselves.

This is not a matter of one training or one memorandum of cooperation. It is a matter of whether the system is willing to hand over part of its power to the people currently on the other side of the asymmetry described above.

The E=mc² formula works here exactly as it does everywhere else: energy does not appear when we talk about people as mass in a report. It appears when we remove the barrier between their potential and the chance to realize it.

None of this starts with a strategy document. It starts with whoever reads this deciding to walk one path they have never walked before, sit at one table they have never been invited to, or shrink one form they have never questioned. The formula only holds if someone actually applies it.