Wars and violent conflicts are among the most severe causes of humanitarian crises. They often force people to flee their homes and result in shortages of food, water, and medical care. Humanitarian disasters threaten or destroy the lives of countless people, including children, who are often the…

From March 2022 through November 2025, the Emergency Pedagogy Department of the Friends of Waldorf Education was able to support children, adolescents, and pedagogues in Ukraine through, among other initiatives, four training cycles, each consisting of eight modules. The participating pedagogues…

The Kryvyi Rih school is one of the oldest Waldorf schools in Ukraine, having been founded in the 1990s. Despite the major challenges faced over the past four years, neither the school’s daily routine nor life in the school’s nursery has come to a standstill. To make this possible, the construction…

The Warvin Organisation for Child Rights is a local non-governmental organisation operating in the Iraqi city of Sinjar. It is supported by the Emergency Pedagogy Department of the Friends of Waldorf Education. Warvin was founded in 2024 by project director Sadoon Barakat, a Yazidi who had been…

In April 2026, a six-person team from the Emergency Pedagogy Department of the Friends of Waldorf Education, led by coordinator Lina Bäuerle, travelled to Myanmar for two weeks. Many people there are still suffering from the devastating consequences of the earthquake in March 2025. Added to this is…

A few years ago, Jure Castro Iraguha founded the volunteer organisation Blessed to Bless Life Ministries (BBLM) in the Kyaka II refugee camp in western Uganda. Having fled to Uganda himself to escape the violent conflicts in the Congo, Jure's goal was to support children and young people in…

For over 20 years, the Phoenix curative pedagogical school in Kharkiv has been supporting people with disabilities. The staff at the school are doing their utmost to continue working with the children and young people as best they can, despite the war. The Friends of Waldorf Education have been…

Last year, the Friends of Waldorf Education provided financial support to several Israeli Waldorf institutions for the construction of shelters, including kindergartens in Ramat Gan, near Tel Aviv. Lilach Dgani from the Association for the Advancement of Education in Ramat Gan regularly updates us…

One of the main aims of the Mbagathi Rudolf Steiner School is to offer children from disadvantaged families a future – this applies to the majority of the more than 400 children and young people across ten year-groups, as well as in the nursery. Given that most children’s families are rarely able to…

Zoe Besand is a Waldorf kindergarten teacher and has been a regular volunteer with the educational emergency response teams of The Friends of Waldorf Education for over 13 years, taking part in missions around the world. We asked her to share her impressions with us.