Leading Without Certainty

Making Bold Decisions and Building Resilient Nonprofits

Yuriy Boyechko is the Founder and CEO of Hope for Ukraine, a humanitarian nonprofit organization established in 2016 that provides emergency relief and long-term assistance to people affected by war in Ukraine.

Under his leadership, Hope for Ukraine has developed a network of approximately 1,500 volunteers delivering food, essential supplies, and innovative humanitarian solutions to communities facing extraordinary challenges. Yuriy has championed technology-driven initiatives, including the Hope App for coordinating and tracking humanitarian aid and the Solar Energy Resilience Program, which provides portable power solutions to families living without reliable electricity.

With a background in the for-profit sector, Yuriy brings an entrepreneurial approach to nonprofit leadership, emphasizing rapid decision-making, transparent communication, organizational culture, and measurable impact. His philosophy of acting with incomplete information, empowering frontline teams, and adapting methods while protecting the mission offers practical lessons for leaders navigating uncertainty.

Yuriy is also the author of the forthcoming book Defying Hope, sharing stories of the courageous volunteers who have dedicated themselves to serving others during Ukraine’s humanitarian crisis.

His leadership philosophy is captured in a simple but powerful statement: “Courage is contagious.”

Website: https://hfu.org/

 

Episode Summary

What happens when nonprofit leaders must make critical decisions without having all the information? In a world of rapid change, limited resources, and unpredictable challenges, waiting for certainty can become one of the greatest risks to organizational success.

In this episode of The Nonprofit Exchange, Hugh Ballou welcomes Yuriy Boyechko, Founder and CEO of Hope for Ukraine, for a powerful conversation about courageous leadership, organizational resilience, and the importance of adapting quickly without compromising mission or values.

Drawing on his experience leading humanitarian relief efforts in war-torn Ukraine, Yuriy shares how his organization coordinates approximately 1,500 volunteers, delivers essential assistance to communities in crisis, and makes consequential decisions when conditions can change by the hour.

Central to the conversation is Yuriy’s 70% Decision Rule—the principle that leaders rarely have complete information and must learn to act responsibly with what they know while remaining flexible enough to adjust as new information emerges. He explains how communication, trust, frontline empowerment, and technology help his team respond effectively in unpredictable circumstances.

One compelling example is Hope for Ukraine’s Solar Energy Resilience Program. When traditional food distribution proved insufficient for families without electricity or safe cooking options, the organization adapted its approach by providing solar-powered generators. This innovation illustrates a vital leadership lesson: The mission remains constant, but the methods must evolve to meet changing needs.

Hugh and Yuriy also explore the importance of organizational culture, psychological safety, and delegation. When leaders create environments where people can communicate openly, report problems without fear, and contribute to decisions, they build organizations capable of responding to challenges without relying on one person to carry every burden.

Yuriy challenges nonprofit leaders to embrace technology, communicate consistently with supporters, demonstrate measurable impact, and remember that relationships and trust are foundational to long-term sustainability.

Key Takeaways

• Act before certainty arrives. Effective leaders make informed decisions with incomplete information and adapt as circumstances change.
• Communication builds trust. Transparent, consistent communication strengthens relationships with staff, volunteers, donors, and communities.
• Protect the mission, not the method. Organizational innovation begins when leaders respond to actual needs rather than defend established programs.
• Empower frontline teams. The people closest to the work often possess the information leaders need to make better decisions.
• Build a culture of learning. When challenges and failures become opportunities for improvement, organizations become more resilient.
• Use technology strategically. Digital tools can improve coordination, accountability, efficiency, and donor confidence.
• Demonstrate impact. Supporters need to understand how their contributions produce meaningful results.

A Final Thought

Yuriy leaves nonprofit leaders with a memorable principle:

“Courage is contagious.”

When leaders demonstrate courage, communicate openly, and remain committed to meaningful impact, they inspire others to join the mission—even when the future remains uncertain.

This episode offers practical insights for nonprofit executives, board members, clergy, and purpose-driven leaders who want to move beyond reactive management and build organizations that remain effective through change.

Learn more about Yuriy Boyechko and Hope for Ukraine: https://hfu.org/

The Interview Transcript

Hugh Ballou

Welcome, this is Hugh Ballou. Welcome to the Nonprofit Exchange. Nonprofit leaders are often asked to make consequential decisions before the full picture is clear. Yet, waiting for certainty can become its own costly decision. Today we explore how to lead with courage, accountability, and adaptability when circumstances shift faster than established plans can keep up. My guest today is Yuriy Boyechko and he’s founder and CEO of Hope for Ukraine, a humanitarian nonprofit established in 2016. His organization supports people affected by war with emergency relief and long-term assistance, including food, shelter, medical supplies, and energy solutions.

His experience offers timely lessons for leaders navigating fast-changing needs with limited resources. The title for today’s episode of The Nonprofit Exchange is Leading Without Certainty: Making bold decisions and building resilient nonprofits. Yuriy, welcome to the Nonprofit Exchange. What is the single biggest misconception nonprofit leaders have about leading through a crisis or sudden change?

Yuriy Boyechko

First of all, thank you for having me. Nonprofit sector is a very difficult sector. I started my professional life in for-profit world, and I’m never going to forget the phone call I had with our legal team who helped us form this nonprofit. And I was like, Tom, can you help us file for 501(c)(3)? And he was like, Yuri, you are crazy. You don’t know what you get yourself into. This is a very difficult industry to be in. But in the end of the day, with all the difficulties, this is the most rewarding place to be. And I think there’s a lot of uncertainty in nonprofit space that we depend on donations, right, from public. We depend on donation from grants.

And that’s how we keep on doing the work that we do, whatever field you’re in. But I think for us we find out from our experience that communication, clear communication, is the key to lead through uncertainty. Because I tell everyone, Once communications are broken, relationships fall apart. And that’s what we put as a cornerstone of our organization, that we always communicate, whether it’s good or bad or ugly news, we communicate among ourselves, we communicate to our donors, we communicate to our public, and that’s how a trust builds. So the best way to lead through uncertainty is to have communication channels always open, and those channels, they will build the bridge.

So when the storms come and difficult decisions facing your organization, you are able to cross over the storm and be safe on the other side. So that’s my little a little feedback on that particular question.

Hugh Ballou

Talk or dig deeper into why we’re certain, and we wait, and we wait, and we wait for certainty. What’s the cost of waiting too long?

Yuriy Boyechko

The time is going to pass you by. Right now, decisions are made daily. I always tell that. Money follows impact. Money doesn’t follow vision. If you do a big vision casting meeting, you will sit and wait. The days of having 20-page nicely polished report is not something that public can interact with. Right now in the age of social media, it’s now, it’s five minutes, it’s 10 minutes. They want 15-second update from you. So you basically have to run your organization in real time. And you’re never going to have 100% information if you’re going to wait.

But you’re going to be able to examine what you have and just take the 70% of the best information you have and feed it to the public. Make decisions like we work in a war zone. So we basically every day have to make decisions, not even with 70% of clarity. Sometimes we make 50% decisions. There are certain things that are non-negotiable. We’re never going to alter some things. Such as safety of our team, X, Y, and Z. But as far as do we go to this town or that town, that’s always subject to change. So that’s basically right now in this new age we live in, in a digital world, it’s the things not changing every year, things changing. Technology is changing every week, I would say.

So you as, and I as a leader, we always constantly have to learn. Me, I’m constantly, when I get home I work seven days a week. There’s no such thing as nine to five right now as a nonprofit leader. Once I don’t run the nonprofit, I learn, I search YouTube, I read books, I go learn the latest trends in technology, because technology right now, adopting technology in your operations is a cornerstone. Just like I said, one cornerstone is communication. Adopting technology and having technology help you run your organization is going to resolve so many issues that we’re facing as leaders.

Hugh Ballou

It’s staying flexible, staying informed. That’s such an important point I want to highlight. Communication is at the root of leadership. Communication is at the root of fundability. It’s all based on relationships. So communication is a relationship tool. So dig in a little deeper on your 70% decision rule and in real practice, how do we know when we have enough information to act? And then talk about a safe-to-fail checkpoint. How can leaders learn to adjust quickly without compromising safety, trust, or stewardship of, we actually manage other people’s money. So say more about the 70% decision rule, please.

Yuriy Boyechko

So 70% is basically, you look at all the information you have available. I mean, in our world, you’re never going to have 100%. So I always, I trust my instincts. I trust my team leads’ instincts. So the way I look at it, I can only see it this far. But I have other teammates, one that’s looking on my left side, another one looking on my right side, and one looking on my back side. So in our particular case, when we have, every day we deliver aid. So we get information in the morning. Okay, this is what we’re going to do, this is where we’re going to go. But we don’t know how safe it is. We don’t know if the people are going to be there that we need to meet.

But first I get information that I know from the ground, then I speak to my on-the-ground leaders. What’s the current situation in that particular area? Do you guys have enough supply? Are the roads clear? Then I speak to our team here in the office also to gather all the information that we have. And then once we have enough information that we know that people we sent are safe, then we go ahead and give a green light. And as we put the tools in their hands. So another thing is you gotta equip your team. In order for them not to fail. So we’ve developed a software called Hope App. So that’s basically like a DoorDash for humanitarian aid.

So we are able to track our teams in real time. So they know when they come to our warehouse, where they deliver, where they distribute, and then we take that information. So they distribute aid to people we serve. They send us reports in the real time almost, pictures, videos, documentation. Then we take that information and we send to our donors. So that creates the full loop. So our donors and our supporters, they know where the money went. So I tell everyone, if anybody calls us, I say, hey, what are you guys doing? And they’ll follow us on social media for 24 hours. They’ll need to know what we do.

So we’re basically able to link everybody up, and that’s what helps close those 30% that we don’t know. Because we start with 70%, but once you complete the mission, you have the complete pie because you basically close the loop on everyone. So the team is safe, people served, constituents are happy. And that’s, I think, the triangle that any nonprofit leader is looking for to achieve every day when we do what we do.

Hugh Ballou

You talk about mission versus method. You have a very clear mission. So I’ve seen over the years. I’ve been doing this about 40 years and I’ve interviewed almost 700 people on the show. And so I’ve heard a lot of different stories. We get stuck in. This is how we do things the method. And sometimes that compromises the mission that we’ve been called to. And the mission, and like you so rightly lifted up, impact is what gets action. Both people that volunteer, participate, money, time, talent, money, it all depends on that. Talk about the struggle and then can you share an example of changing a delivery model yourself while staying deeply faithful with the purpose of first?

That’s a conflict with sometimes for people it shouldn’t be, but it is. Where have you been able to adjust the method to be able to stay true to your mission and fully fulfill your mission?

Yuriy Boyechko

Look, we have about 1,500 volunteers. How many? 1,500 on the ground in Ukraine.

Unidentified speaker

1,500.

Yuriy Boyechko

So how do you keep 1,500 volunteers energized and connected to your vision for almost five years. Number one, they know we’re always there for them. So they know every time they pull up the van to our warehouse, we will fill that van with the aid for the communities they serve complete. Number two, they know we give them tools. We give them app, we give them technology when they need a drone, detecting technology, whatever, whatever to keep them safe. And number three, we always innovate. So give an example of innovation. And I think this is very important too, because a lot of folks, they are stuck on the programs, or we’ve been doing the same program for 40 years, we don’t adjust our programs.

So we’ve started, our biggest program is still food distribution. So we would distribute food kits, and we would, in 2024, we would bring food kits to certain areas, and people would have nowhere to cook. So we would give them food kit, and there was no gas, there was no electricity. So the only way for people to prepare food would burn the firewood outside. But in the areas we work, we burn firewood the enemy sees on the other side, and instead of the meal, you get a drone in your window. Because they see the smoke, they see it, and they send the drone your way. So I had an idea to give these families, together with the food kit, a solar power generator. So I went myself.

I’m never going to forget when this program started. It was December 24, January 2025. I went to Costco myself. So I looked through every like Costco doesn’t have too many products. So there was a particular unit there called Jackery. A solar power generator, it was a solar panel and a generator. So I was like, okay, this would be a great idea to give to these families. So they can plug in and cook on it. So we bought one of the units, we tested it out, we bought a cooktop, electric cooktop that would plug in into the into the unit. So that’s how that started. Right now, the Solar Energy Resilience Program, it’s a brand new program that started in January 2025.

But right now, it’s one of the biggest programs we have. And just this week, we have distributed about 3,000 of these solar power generators. But it all came from innovation. We did not just stick to our old game play strategy. And we introduced this new program. So, because we address the needs on the ground, and I think this is what public craves. Public wants to see nonprofits address real needs on the ground. If you’re working in an environment where there is a real crisis, don’t do. Art exhibits. Because this is completely opposite. Just do a mission that’s completely that targets the problem that’s people facing that you serve. So that’s a little example on that.

Hugh Ballou

It’s having been in Ukraine, I have a feel for what you’re talking about. And since I was there in 1997, things have changed a lot. And so it was an interesting journey for me and lovely, lovely kind people. So let’s dig into team resilience and psychological safety. So you talked earlier about communication, bad or good. So when the stakes are high, how do you create an environment where your frontline staff can identify risks, challenge assumptions, or report bad news without fear of blame.

Yuriy Boyechko

So, you never from any failure from any defeat, you never lose, you learn from it. And I think that’s the type of culture we’re trying to installed in our organization that as long as you communicate to us. We don’t want anything to be hidden. I don’t want to find out three months later that something happened and you didn’t let us know. So if things didn’t go the way we planned, just be 100% honest, come to us, say, hey this is what happened. We couldn’t do what we were trying to do and we just go back to the drawing board and we re-evaluate. So we constantly, right, assessing our programs.

And basically there’s certain times where we had to pull back the missions because we knew that it was not safe, right, for us to go in certain days. So we imagine that we have a team of three, four people sitting in the van, ready to go from point A to point B. And you give them the last, you give them information that you should not go today. We will have to postpone for the, but because of the intelligence we get, because we rely, our decision’s not made from top down. Our decision mostly, we get a lot of information from ground up. So we trust information we get from our team leads, from our volunteer leads.

And I think this is what motivates them because they understand that the leadership on the highest level listen to their advice. And I think this is very important in any organization is to always value advice and communication from any team person, whatever the level of organization they are in. Whether they are the executive team, managerial leadership, or just the regular folks who work for you. I think having open door policy and having a policy where every opinion you take it in, you analyze it, if it’s valid, you. And I think that’s what motivates people, that they know that they are heard, they know that their opinions are taken into decision-making process.

I think that’s why we are able to keep this team going for so long, because they know that they’re not just some kind of number in organization. But they are really a member of the community. They are really a member of a chain that holds the whole thing together.

Hugh Ballou

So talk about the invisible burnout and delegation. This is an area a lot of nonprofit leaders struggle with. The leader does too much. So you’ve got a lot of things going on and establishing boundaries, but giving some delegating to decision making. How difficult is that? And how do you make that delegation work so you don’t get burnout and your top leaders don’t get burned out?

Yuriy Boyechko

So I mean you as a leader need to know how to do everything, a little bit of everything in organization. And then, basically, once you have like in our organization, everybody started from the bottom. Like, we promote within. So once you have folks come in and they can prove that they understand the culture, because for us, it’s the most important to protect the culture. Culture matters more than talent. If you don’t have good culture in nonprofit space, because in the end of the day, people don’t work here for money. You’re not going to make, you’re not going to get rich working in nonprofit sector. So people need to feel safe.

And so as long as we have someone who embraces the culture, right, who understands the process, then little by little they get assignments delegated to them, and as they complete, they keep growing and getting promoted and going on and on and on.

Hugh Ballou

You know, it’s a hard thing for people to master, but you’ve kept at it since 2016, and you’ve got a success record. So I guess not giving up is probably the bottom line here, isn’t it? Yeah, you cannot give up. I just passed 80 years old last month, and I’m still learning stuff. So your website is the abbreviations for Hope for Ukraine, hfu.org. So when people go there, what will they find?

Yuriy Boyechko

So what are they going to find about our programs? Updates, what we do. They’re going to find information about my upcoming book, Defying Hope. So that book was basically stories of the volunteers that we worked with for over five years and how they basically left the civilian life on pause and so I think this book is very powerful for any nonprofit leader to really see how you can work with volunteers for such a long time and have them still. So, and also, everything, I mean, this is this website has a lot of information, so anyone who wants to know about our programs, what we do, they can visit there and find out more.

Hugh Ballou

Great, great, great, great. A lot of good information there. So a lot of good information, a lot of inspiration for nonprofit leaders. So for a small nonprofit with limited staff resources, what is one practical change leaders can make this week to become more adaptive?

Yuriy Boyechko

Lean on technology. I mean, right now with the tech tools we have available, I mean, you can basically run a lot of tasks using technology. So I think just always stay on top. For example when we developed that app it took, like we would have to have about, four to five people doing what this piece of technology is doing. But there’s a lot of free tools. And another thing is, if you’re not on social media, you need to be on social media yesterday. Because we, like in our experience, we’ve been doing updates every two hours, in real time, every day for two years. And the kind of growth we’ve seen, but you have to be consistent. You cannot just go like.

You’re doing that one week and you. Because what happens in the social media world, you get free advertisement. Because once these platforms see that you’re constantly posting, we don’t spend a dollar on social media advertisement. But we get free algorithmic boosts because of our presence there. So my advice is for any leader is constantly update on your social media channels and you’re going to get some love from places like Meta, Google, that you don’t even know. Because they will reward you for you putting content on their platform.

Hugh Ballou

Yes, the consistency. So as a final question, what gives you hope when outcomes are uncertain? And what final principle would you leave with purpose-driven leaders today?

Yuriy Boyechko

My principle is courage is contagious. I think once you as a leader show courage, there’s going to be so many people who would want to join your club. And that’s how you build a successful organization. Because what we do as nonprofit leaders, we’re trying to solve some big issues in this world. And a lot of that it takes a lot of grit and courage to be your one man company sometimes. And face the huge challenge. Whether it’s hunger, whether it’s clean water, whether it’s homelessness. But if you have enough courage, people are going to join you. So that’s my last thought for the day.

Hugh Ballou

Have courage. Our mission can remain steady when our methods must change. Leadership in uncertainty is not about knowing everything. It’s about taking thoughtful action, listening closely, learning quickly, and building teams that can carry the work together. Yuriy, thank you for helping us see what resilient leadership looks like in everyday practice. You’re a hero. Thank you for being my guest today on the Nonprofit Exchange.

Yuriy Boyechko

Thanks for having me here. Thank you so much.