Business and donations. How Nesemos car hub works with veterans and repairs cars worth a million

Most veterans don't need to be taught the "How to Adapt a Veteran After War" methodology at work, says LIGA.net Maria Ksyondzyk, co-founder and director of Nesemos Veteran Auto Hub. "They need a job and a comfortable team. But the key is that they need employers to start noticing them.

In 2022, Maria, together with her partner Petro Shuklinov – a former editor of LIGA.net and now a soldier in the Armed Forces of Ukraine – created the Nesemos volunteer foundation. It all started when their friend offered to donate his car to the military. In three years, the initiative has grown into a socially responsible business that provides over UAH 1,000,000 in monthly support to the army and creates jobs for veterans.

What difficulties do defenders face in finding a job after returning from the war and how one service station creates a culture of working with veterans despite the lack of universal guidelines – investigated LIGA.net.

"Thank you for your service, there is no job". The story of one veteran

"When I started looking for a job after my discharge from military service, I was rejected for almost all vacancies as soon as they found out about my injury," he says LIGA.net "They seemed to be thanking me for my service, but they said that they thought it would be difficult for me to cope with the job.

Ruslan is a veteran of the elite 25th Separate Airborne Brigade of Sicheslav. His service began in the fall of 2022: "I couldn't stand it any longer. I realized that I would be more useful in the army than just sitting at home. So I went."

Almost a year later, he was wounded. He repelled another assault, and on the way to the dugout, he saw a light flying at him as if in slow motion. It turned out to be an AGS grenade. Then came evacuation, treatment, amputation of his arm, and rehabilitation.

Finding a job after returning to civilian life turned out to be a quest – there was not a single vacancy that a young man would be willing to take. Except for a few offers to work as a security guard. But on conditions he did not agree to.

"Then I decided that it was better to look for a job among those people who were involved in helping the army," Ruslan says.

However, he still found his job at Nesemos Veteran Auto Hub by accident – he just stopped by to get his car repaired. He asked if there were any vacancies for him. Ruslan was offered a position as a receptionist. He didn't have the necessary experience, but he was trained and prepared for the job.

At this service station, Ruslan changed several more positions: he tried his hand at driving, and eventually became a manager of car adaptation for veterans with disabilities.

This is a typical story for Nesemos Veteran Auto Hub. The service station, conceived as a social business, is in no hurry to fire people, explains co-founder and director Maria Ksiądzik. "Unlike many other businesses, the idea of not hiring veterans is not even considered here – supporting the army is at the heart of the project.

"Who needs a pickup?" How the veteran service station started

Two years after the great invasion, Nesemos turned from a volunteer project that drove cars to the front for the military into a full-fledged automotive hub. The scaling was based on a simple idea: to meet the needs of the army in cars.

It all started with a friend of Mariia and Petro's who wrote a post asking: "Who needs a pickup truck?" and offered his car to the military. There were thousands of responses.

To fill this obvious need, a team of volunteers started a car fundraiser for the military. "Now we are working on a turnkey basis: we raise money, look for, buy, paint, repair and transfer them to the balance sheet of a military unit," says Maria.

At first, the vehicles were repaired at different service stations, but this did not provide any guarantees. One day, a mistake by the mechanics turned out to be critical: the wheels fell off the vehicle on the way to the front – it turned out that none of them had been bolted on, only grabbed.

To fully control the quality, the volunteers decided to organize their own repairs.

"To come to someone else's business and say, 'We'll put our own mechanic at your service station and let him fix something for the military,' was not a good idea. So we just rented our garage, found two mechanics, and started assembling our five or six cars a month with donations," says Maria.

This revealed an even bigger need: there were virtually no services ready to specifically service and repair vehicles for the military. Other volunteers and military personnel began to approach the small garage with requests to take their cars into service.

So the garage had to expand to meet this need as well.

Just for the future. From an industrial garage to a car hub

They decided to work immediately for the future, Maria recalls: "If we are going to put all our savings in one basket, we need to make it a large-scale veteran car hub."

The start-up capital was their own savings and a €7,000 grant from an online express incubator for social initiatives. This was enough to buy three lifts, several other pieces of equipment, and put the first box into operation. The rest of the premises were being completed at the same time. We did the repairs on our own, literally collecting materials from everyone who was willing to support the initiative.

At first, we worked exclusively with front-line vehicles. At the same time, they were looking for new grants for development. Maria traveled to learn from different service stations across the country.

"This market is not standardized, so it's both complicated and interesting at the same time," she says. "Everyone develops as they want and as they can. You ask someone if the purchase of the collapse paid off, and they say: "Horrible! Don't waste your time and money!", while another says that it is a very necessary thing that will definitely help us in our work. That's why you can't just adopt someone else's experience. Rather, you have to listen to what others have done and then think about what to do for yourself."

In 2025, the Nesemos Veteran Auto Hub started servicing commercial vehicles in a test mode as well. The founders initially included the commercial component in their plans to balance the project's activities.

While at the beginning of the year, commercial customers accounted for 30% of the total number of cars serviced, this figure has now risen to 70%. The first customers were from the military, subscribers and donors to the volunteer initiative.

And then the word of mouth started to work.

The monthly number of repaired frontline vehicles has also increased from 22 to 36. All military vehicles are serviced at the expense of donors – we manage to raise about UAH 1,000,000 every month. The cherished dream is to reach a level that will allow us to fully cover the repairs of frontline vehicles at our own expense, even if donors disappear completely. The downward trend is quite steady.

The best way to optimize the process here is to optimize the process, says Maria: "Being in the social business is very exciting: you communicate with people, do an important thing, they thank you, you thank them. But for all this to work, you sometimes need to step away from it, dive into Exel spreadsheets and lose the meaning of life in them a little bit. Without this, it's impossible to understand how to do more and better with the same facilities."

Previously, the car hub's lifts could accommodate a maximum of 16 cars per month, she says. Maria tried to figure out how to increase the flow. The masters convinced her that it was impossible. Because the cars would still get stuck: you can't roll a disassembled car out of the lift, and if it's a frontline snag, you have to look for the necessary spare part at a dismantling facility or wait a long time for it to arrive from abroad.

The solution was unexpectedly spied on by colleagues, says Maria: "We found devices that some handy-men had developed in one of the garages. They allow you to roll a disassembled car out of the lift, set it aside, and then roll it back in. That's how we went from 16 cars to more than 20 cars a month using the same facilities."

The more the business grew, the more obvious another market need became: personnel. Therefore, the atomic hub began working on training veterans for new professions.

No methodologies: how to create jobs for veterans

Mariia is not inclined to call the car hub's approach to hiring veterans reintegration into civilian life. She admits that she has come to the conclusion that veterans do not need any special approaches from employers. First of all, they need a job and a team that is comfortable with their values.

"We just need to create good working conditions for everyone," she says, "so that everyone, regardless of their status, feels comfortable coming to work here. Someone should give a tour and answer questions for a newcomer. To have the opportunity to learn. So that if one job doesn't work out very well, but you have a desire, you can try yourself in something else. That's why we are open to such migration."

Anatoliy, a former military man, was brought to Nesemos by a friend to work as a mechanic.

But his injury prevented him from working properly. "I was a driver-paramedic for three years," he says. "Once I pulled a wounded guy from the battlefield. I dragged him to the car, took him out, and brought him to the hospital. And on my way back, the doctor grabbed me by the arm: "Where are you going?" I started to explain that there were other guys lying there, I had to take them away, and he was like: "Stop. You have already arrived". It was only then that I noticed that I was wounded as well."

Since then, Anatoliy has had osteomyelitis of the shoulder joint, which prevents him from working with his arms. That's why the car hub offered him a job as a driver.

This example is not entirely typical. Most veterans, Nesemos employees say, find it extremely difficult to find a job, especially if they have severe injuries or disabilities. Their words are confirmed by research Ukrainian Veterans Fund: more than half of veterans (51.7%) expect difficulties with employment due to a lack of adapted jobs and retraining programs.

According to veterans working at Nesemos, one of the reasons for this situation is the lack of flexibility of employers. The state is not active in this matter. Its active role in the life of a veteran ends at the stage of payment of compensation for injuries, and is further limited to social benefits and privileges.

When it comes to hiring veterans, there are no universal guidelines, Maria continues. The most common recommendations are corporate stories aimed at people who went to war from the office of a large company, returned to the same place after dismissal, received a mentor and conditions for adaptation in the team.

There were no such guidelines for companies that did not have the resources to do so, or for blue-collar workers. They had to gain experience on their own. That's why Maria is now looking for other businesses that employ veterans to share their experiences and lessons learned.

"At some point, I noticed that I was elevating the veteran in his status so much that I didn't know how to interact with him. So the first of my main lessons is that you don't need to idealize a person," summarizes Maria. "The second lesson is that you need a lot of patience. Everyone has a certain experience. Sometimes they need more time to adapt. In some cases, they need to learn to take responsibility for new duties. Someone immediately joins the work process and takes initiative, while others need to be trained for months. But all this is not just about veterans. It's about all people."

Materials created LIGA.net is supported by the Askold & Dir Foundation, administered by ISAR Ednannia as part of the project "Strong Civil Society in Ukraine – Driving Reforms and Democracy" with funding from Norway and Sweden. The content of this publication is the responsibility of LIGA.net and do not reflect the views of the governments of Norway, Sweden or ISAF Ednannia.