Corporate Values: Summary of Incora’s Team Activities of 2023

New Year’s Eve is always a time to look back at the previous year to analyze all the activities and processes in your life, examine them, and summarize what was great, and what you can do better next year.

Incora is not an exception. However, today we would like to avoid boring numbers and corporate documentation discussions and to express our feelings and make a retrospective on the volunteering experience of our whole team instead.

Clearly, working performance is an essential part of any job, however, we believe, that instead of calculating all the working hours and projects we took part in, it is better to talk about something like volunteering, because it shows team spirit and performance even better when it comes to judging from the results.

Let’s skip the boring part with “This was a tough year and blah-blah-blah”, and be clear instead:

Incora is a Ukrainian company; most of our employees are Ukrainian citizens. Combined with the fact, that almost 2 years ago Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it is clear, that each of our members somehow suffered from this event. Yet, what is even more important - each of us also has a volunteering experience and constantly tries to participate in any way possible.

For a better illustration, we gathered a few volunteering activities of Incora, which took place in 2023. So, buckle up!

Nothing Personal!

First things first, it is worth admitting, that the volunteering movement in Ukraine was always a significant phenomenon even before the russian full-scale invasion. However, after 24 February 2022, it transformed into something new and became an everyday routine in terms of the whole country.

The reason for it is very simple: the scale of the invasion resulted in the fact, that each third Ukrainian citizen had someone, who suffered from the invasion (according to research). It means, that the war becomes personal.

Besides, each of us knows at least one person, who joined the armed forces. As a result, each of us tries to help our friends and relatives to save their lives on the frontline and send them anything, that can improve their routine.

So, at the very beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, we mostly supported third-party initiatives, sent money to crowdfunding funds and individuals, or even launched our campaigns.

For instance, one of our employees joined the Armed Forces himself. To support him, we bought all the important equipment and sent it to him.

Incora for Ukraine

Despite the variety of initiatives and possibilities to donate money for good purposes, we decided, that we have to scale ourselves and gain more legal rights for our future volunteering.

To do so, we decided to register our volunteering fund “Incora for Ukraine”. With the use of it, we got a chance to perform our crowdfunding activities, as well as legalize our volunteering experience, significantly upscaling the possibilities for activities, and performing everything in terms of law.

Thanks to this foundation, it is possible to perform various crowdfunding events like our last auction and lecture from the border guards, which helped to gather enough money and buy a specialized Javelin simulator to improve the State Border Guard soldier training.

Such a thing may seem not as essential as it is. Dmytro, the person whom we cooperate with, managed to create a new hand-made alternative to training Javelin rocket launchers, which exist in limited numbers and have very strict specifications and limitations such as the need for a permanent source of energy, has a limited number of scenarios to be used for, etc.

Instead, Dmytro found a way to create as accurate a simulator as possible, including the ballistics calculations of the rocket, hardware design, and software solutions, the combination of which is not as expensive as more traditional Javelin simulators.

Additionally, the Incora for Ukraine fund managed to buy 10 body cameras for the Western Regional Office of the State Border Service of Ukraine and donate a brand-new DJI Mavic 3 to the National Guard of Ukraine. It is hard to overestimate the role of drones in modern times, especially when it comes to combat operations. Such drones as DJI Mavic 3 are not cheap, yet they bring a lot of value to any process on the frontline, significantly improving the routine of soldiers.

All the preceding are just a few recent activities of Incora for Ukraine, which happened during this year.

Incora Team Volunteering Experience

While our charitable foundation is engaged in multiple projects, aimed at increasing the combat capability of our soldiers and providing them with all required inventory, our niche-experienced developers, as well as the rest of the team, are actively volunteering in other spheres.

The first, and most obvious way to take an active part in the Ukrainian victory - is to donate. This is the reason, why we decided to try out our first-ever auction in Winter. Thanks to our team’s donations, we managed to help multiple UAF units, by buying all kinds of useful equipment, starting with cars, and ending with batteries and Starlinks.

However, the war is not the only available theme for our employees. As a matter of fact, thanks to such unfortunate events we still managed to discover new and amazing things, such as everyday charity and volunteering.

Therefore, our staff is constantly participating in numerous activities like walking dogs from the shelter, blood donations, or even playing different mind games, money for participation was sent to UAF!

“CodeForPeace” Hackathon

One of the recent complex projects of our team is the “CodeForPeace” Hackathon, which took place at our office in Lviv and managed to gather people from 6 different regions of Ukraine!

For 2 days straight our guests brainstormed on the idea of how to improve the social life of Ukrainians during the war. As a result, we managed to shape a few different, yet valuable applications, starting with donate automation systems and ending with apps that should help army veterans to find a job, they are interested in.

The winning team decided to create a platform for organizing and simplifying the management of charity and other types of events, and Incora gladly helps them embody this great idea right now!

Social Activities of Our Team

Eventually, our team members are taking an active part in different events, even when they are not related to war.

For instance, our employees are participating in a running club, i.e. we have had regular team training for almost six months already. We would like to congratulate our running club on their first marathon for 10km (approximately 6.2 miles)!

Besides, running is not the only way, how our teammates spend their free time. Talking about sports, we are in love with our tennis desk, located in the office. Sometimes, we even have friendly competitions between the Incora crew members after working hours.

Alternatively, we also encourage our employees to participate in less active, yet extremely entertaining and demanding games like chess. For instance, one of our last chess championships, which have regularly taken place in our office for more than 2 years!

We highly value self-development and learning new skills. Therefore, we are glad to perform #IncoraTalks from time to time, especially, when our teammates have something interesting to share. Our previous meetings were dedicated to legal consultations, related to the IT sphere in Ukraine, where we all learned new information about modern regulations of this market in our country.

However, we are not limited to internal knowledge sharing! We truly believe that it is essential to share your experience with as many people, as possible. Therefore, we are trying to scale our external contacts with the rest of the Ukrainian IT community, to make it not only CEO-to-CEO contacts but also to boost the communication between developers. So, one of our first stems on this long way was to hold a DevToDev webinar, dedicated to the topic of artificial intelligence and specifically of using ChatGPT for various purposes.

Apart from that, we would also like to honor the idea of celebrating St. Nikolas Day by sending gifts for more than 80 children from the orphanage boarding house to bring them happiness and joy on this holiday. It is essential to remember those who need our help, especially in such dark times, so we are proud to have such caring people on board!

How CEO Leads Incora’s Core Values?

Frankly, not only our employees are the ones, who are actively participating in different events and are generously supporting different initiatives.

Our CEO, Bohdan Vasylkiv, is undoubtedly a great example of how to stimulate people to do good. He was the first to develop the idea of maintaining different socially aimed initiatives almost daily.

Therefore, apart from the company events, Bohdan also collaborates with many different third-party organizations to help with urgent needs. For example, recently he personally bought 3 Starlink stations due to the fact, that there was no time to wait for the crowdfunding campaign.

The same was true with the previous donation of a voice gateway for the Ukrainian Airforce. Also, Bohdan participated in the crowdfunding collaboration “Ptashky Peremohy” (birds of victory), in terms of which organizers managed to donate UAF more than 200 quadcopters!

To sum up, we are truly glad to have such an active CEO, who constantly shows all of us examples of how to become a part of something bigger. The previous list is just a few recent activities. Apart from them, we can name a dozen other initiatives, like the Summer campaign, which also included buying drones, financial support for veteran families, buying laptops, and many more.

What’s Next?

Frankly, the number of our plans for the next year is so huge, that it scares even us!

Unfortunately, we can’t name them at the moment. Everything we can - is to assure you, that we are not going to sit still. We also can tell just a little insight that we are going to participate in something, related to FPV drones next year.

In case you have any suggestions, or ideas on how to make an even bigger impact on helping the Ukraine and Ukrainians - drop us a line, and we will gladly get in touch with you!

Thank you for reading this, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!