To guarantee that a donation for drones goes to drones, the fund has to pay an accountant, a bank, a hosting provider, and fuel when someone has to drive out for a delivery. We do not bury these costs inside campaigns for the brigade — they have their own account. Supporting it is up to you.
Any lawful charitable foundation has costs: statutory filings, bank fees on every payment, legal support for contracts, domain and hosting, audit. A foundation claiming "0% costs" is either paying out of someone's pocket or simply not showing that line.
We chose the third option: acknowledge the costs openly and separate them from earmarked money across different accounts. Then the sentence "money donated for the brigade did not go to an accountant" is not a promise but a bank statement.
The fund team receives no payment from charitable contributions for the brigade's needs. If a paid role ever appears, it will be funded from this direction, and we will say so as a separate line in the report rather than hide it under "other costs".
The very things that give you confidence — separate accounts, monthly reporting, documents for every purchase, an external audit — have a price. Someone has to do this work and pay for it. Without this direction the guarantee rests on goodwill rather than on procedure.
A fund without paid bookkeeping is slow to process and pay invoices. A week's delay on a batch of airframes is a week the crew works without them. Administration is not what stands between the donor and the front — it is what shortens the distance.
There are only three ways to cover these costs. Quietly take them from earmarked campaigns — dishonest. Pay from the founders' pockets — it holds until it does not, and makes the fund dependent on one person. Or create a separate, transparent direction. We chose the third.
Chipping in for a drone feels good: you can see the result. Chipping in for a bank fee does not. That is why this direction is underfunded in almost every foundation. If you are reading this and transparency is what matters to you, this is the cheapest way to pay for it.
Six blocks. None of them is a “fund salary” — they are the mandatory costs of the organisation existing legally, being able to transfer money and report publicly. The list is not exhaustive: we explain why below.
Without this the fund cannot legally accept money. Keeping the books on every contribution and every expense, monthly reports, annual financial statements, tax filings, maintaining non-profit status.
Every payment to a supplier carries a fee, every account carries a servicing charge. A contribution from abroad goes through currency control. These are not "overheads" — this is the price of being able to transfer money to a supplier at all.
A charitable aid contract, a supplier contract, a handover record with the military unit. Every document you later use to check the fund has to be drawn up correctly by someone — otherwise it has no legal force.
The reporting you use to check the fund has to live somewhere. Domain, hosting, campaign pages, storage for scanned documents — this is what makes transparency physically possible rather than merely declared.
Original handover records and delivery notes do not exist as files. They have to be printed, signed, posted between the fund, the supplier and the military unit, and then kept for the periods the law requires.
An external review of the annual accounts is the only way to confirm the fund's figures by something other than the fund's word. An auditor works for money, and that money cannot come out of what they are auditing.
Operational work does not fit into six bullet points, and pretending it does would be dishonest.
Someone has to drive to another region to collect goods from a supplier — that is fuel, sometimes an overnight stay. Original documents have to be posted — that is postage. A batch has to be weighed, packed and relabelled before dispatch — that is consumables. None of this fits the six blocks above, but without it the fund does not function.
So the wording is this: this account covers any costs related to the fund’s operations — keeping it able to receive money, buy, hand over and report.
There is one boundary, and it is strict: nothing that goes to the brigade is bought from the administrative account. If an item is handed over to a unit under a transfer act, it is paid from the earmarked account, no exceptions. The two accounts do not overlap: not “we try not to mix them”, but differently classified costs on different accounts.
The reverse holds too: the trip to collect goods is paid from here, while the goods themselves come from the earmarked account. One journey can mean two different payments from two different accounts, landing in two different blocks of the monthly report.
This direction’s costs are included in the fund’s annual financial statements and the audit opinion. A donor can request them together with other documents at [email protected].
A separate account is not a blank cheque. To stop this direction becoming a catch-all, we state the limits publicly.
Paid traffic, social media advertising, merchandise and branded items are not paid from this account. The fund talks about itself for free or not at all.
Events, presentations, conference trips, meetings with donors at the fund's expense. If such a trip is needed, whoever goes pays for it.
The fund does not buy itself laptops or furniture and does not rent premises. The team works on its own kit. If that changes, we will say so before we spend.
We do not top up earmarked campaigns from this account, even though technically we could. Otherwise the reporting stops adding up. If it ever becomes necessary, we will show it as a separate line.
The founders and the team cover the costs out of their own pockets, as they do now. Earmarked money for the brigade is never touched.
If this direction raises more than the fund spends in a year, the difference carries over into the next year of the same direction — as a reserve for the audit and unforeseen legal costs.
This is a separate account, not the one earmarked contributions for the brigade go to. A regular ₴200 here is worth more than it looks: it is what makes possible the reporting you use to check everything else.
The administrative direction is not split into campaigns — bank transfer only. Monobank jars are used exclusively for earmarked campaigns for the brigade.
No jar by designA recurring donation of even 200 hryvnia a month gives the fund what matters most — the ability to plan instead of firefighting.
