Greetings from Kavun.City – online media for Kherson and Kherson Region!

We want to thank you for your cooperation and tell you something about us that you may not have known because today is a great reason to do it: our publication turns five years old! To be more exact, four, but we had the 2022 experience. That year comes for two. So, it is five!

Created by the Regional Media Development Agency ABO on October 18, 2019, we inform the people of Kherson, residents of the Kherson Region, Crimea, and everyone who understands the Ukrainian language about what is happening in our country every day. Our life before February 24, 2022, was rich, stylish, and humorous, but the large-scale invasion had a substantial impact on us. However, we did not break!

Remaining under occupation, we continued to work. There was not a single day that we did not release news. We informed the residents of the city via the website, on Facebook, and the Telegram channel. For more than four months, we worked under the noses of the russian occupiers in Kherson. The fact that we managed to leave is still a miracle to us.

Even during the occupation, we kept in touch with our readers and knew their problems. Even during the occupation, we purchased a crowdfunding platform that programmers created for us for a donation to the Armed Forces and collected money for the restoration of the block of the Children’s Rehabilitation Center in Kherson, damaged by the russians; for medicines and medical supplies; for children with disabilities in Kherson; and after de-occupation – for power banks in solar batteries. In general, we collected more than a million hryvnias for civilian and military residents of Kherson during the year, and we continue to do it. Soon, we will make this magical amount of fees public as of today. We are sure that she will impress you. In order to raise money for our military, we not only organize meetings but also raffle books for donations from UAH 20 to UAH 200: we buy popular books and raffle them for a donation. Yes, UAH 18,050 were collected almost imperceptibly for our Soldiers only thanks to books.

We continue to keep in touch with our friends and support them in every way. Understanding that the budget of Kherson and the region cannot cover all needs, we try to support Kherson institutions with nice little things. So, we organized the transfer of two solar power banks for the Kherson library and the hospital. The paint was purchased for artists who create incredible artistic images in shelters and for the indomitable regional library for youth — materials for master classes. All this is a social component of our work. Hopefully, this is just the beginning.

We are incredibly supported by our partners, in particular the Anti-Corruption Headquarters NGO and the Anti-Corruption Dimension publication, fact-checkers Bez Brekhni and Nota Enota. We definitely would not have survived without the support of our donors, each of whom should be thanked separately: friends, supporters, readers, and the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine (NUJU). It’s sincere. The support provided by the NUJU, our friends, and partners is invaluable.

In order to make our work even more interesting, we created the Kavun City online store and two new information channels, which we will present separately very soon. Let’s reveal a secret: the channels will be dedicated to the Kherson Region and Crimea, but NOT in Ukrainian, and the shop unites craftspeople from Kherson.

Thank you for your cooperation and support! You can always count on us. Let’s fly further together!

Best regards,

Kavun. City’s newsroom

Editor-in-chief Yevheniya Virlych. E-mail: [email protected]