Emergency fund and great initiatives for Ukraine: #AcademicsNL for Ukraine
Thanks to the fantastic efforts of many NWO colleagues over the past few months, a range of initiatives have been launched to support, among other things, Ukrainian scientists. For example, employees from NWO Institute ASTRON and JIVE-ERIC sponsored a second-hand ambulance for colleagues from a research collaboration in Ukraine, and NWO Domain Social Sciences and Humanities collected emergency relief goods. But much more has been done.
NWO Institute ARCNL created a guest appointment for a researcher who was already conducting research into EUV plasma in Ukraine before the war broke out. NWO institutes CWI and ASTRON both offer work places for guest researchers via a webpage on the AcademicTransfer website specifically set up for this purpose. On this webpage, a collaboration under #AcademicsNL for Ukraine, Dutch research institutions from UNL, NFU, KNAW and NWO (so also the NWO institutes) offer help in the form of guest appointments, for example. Researchers from Ukraine can apply for these.
Support and encouragement via emergency fund
The NWO Executive Board has established an emergency fund of 1 million euros from which the abovementioned guest appointments can be funded. In addition to this, the emergency fund is intended to aid NWO employees from Ukraine, Russia and Belarus if they end up in (acute) financial problems due to the war because they no longer have access to their bank account, for example. Furthermore, NWO wants to use the emergency fund to encourage and support initiatives from NWO employees that aim to provide assistance to researchers or research institutes in Ukraine via crowdfunding: NWO will double the amount collected up to a maximum of 10,000 euros per initiative, and a maximum of 50,000 euros for all initiatives together.