Volunteer bread has been baked for military personnel and citizens in Kherson for three years.
For three years now, the volunteer bakery “Dela Hromad” Kherson has been baking and treating Ukrainian soldiers and residents with delicious, hot, fragrant bread every day in the frontline city.
“The bread we bake is called ‘Poroshenko bread’ because the equipment was purchased by the Poroshenko Foundation and Delo Hromad immediately after the liberation of our city—and on December 25, 2022, we baked our first loaf,” recalled Kherson volunteer Oksana Pogomiy .
” Our volunteer bakery has been operating for three years. When we were liberated from the occupation, they called me from Kyiv and said, ‘Oksana, get ready, you’re going to have a bakery.’ Petro Oleksiyovych was thinking about how to help Kherson and decided to donate equipment. This new equipment. They brought us a huge generator,” she noted.
“This bread, this bakery—it’s about caring for people. In Kherson, back then and now, we don’t have a single bakery that bakes bread. All our bread is imported,” Pogomiy emphasized.
She said that at first, city authorities prevented the bakery from opening , and only the arrival of Poposhenko and members of parliament from the European Solidarity party made it possible to unblock the operation.
The bakery also suffered damage from enemy shelling. “There wasn’t a bakery somewhere else; we had an air strike nearby. One oven was pierced by debris. The Poroshenko Foundation bought us another oven . One convector costs about a million hryvnias, but these funds were allocated for Kherson because we are in need,” says the volunteer.
Pogomiy also added that local residents often donate flour from humanitarian aid packages to the bakery. “Previously, there were two five-kilogram bags in each humanitarian aid package. But people can’t handle that much, so they look for us to donate it. Of course, not the whole city, but most know about us and want to be at least a little involved in this good cause,” she noted.
“We’re a completely self-sufficient bakery; we’re not dependent on anyone. We bake bread, and right now, almost all of it goes to the military. Whatever’s left, we distribute to the people,” the volunteer explains.
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