How a refugee centre mobilised 1,000 volunteers in 24 hours

How Niine 12 refugee centre uses Zelos

In early March 2022, the top floor of a municipal building in northern Tallinn became Estonia’s first registration office for refugees from Ukraine. The ground floor of the same building filled with volunteers: neighbours, locals, and anyone else who could help. Within a month, a team of six coordinators including Hannele Känd had organised a community of over 2,000 active volunteers serving more than 7,000 refugees in the centre’s first two weeks.

The volunteer side of the operation ran on Zelos. Coordinators posted shifts. Volunteers claimed the slots that fit their availability. The team sent personal reminders ahead of each shift, and thank-you emails at the end of every week. Facebook handled the social side of the community. Zelos handled the schedule.

The challenge

In early March 2022, Tallinn City opened its first refugee registration office without a forecast of arrival volumes. Procedures were ironed out in real time. Waiting times stretched, refugees stood in the cold outside the building, and a handful of locals started showing up to help on their own initiative.

The city embraced the grassroots effort and called a volunteer meeting. The volunteer side of the operation started with five or six people trying to cover round-the-clock shifts. They burned out within days.

By the night of 8 March, the operation needed structure. It also needed a way to recruit and schedule a much larger volunteer base, fast. Three questions had to be answered before any system could work:

What was the refugee journey through the centre, from arriving by bus to completed registration?
Where in that journey could volunteers actually help?
How many volunteers would it take to support that journey around the clock?

The solution

On the night of 8 March, Hannele Känd arrived at the centre to draft answers. Three hours later, the team had a first-draft operational plan: a defined refugee journey, defined volunteer tasks, and defined shift volumes. They posted a Zelos recruitment link with the first available shifts to their Facebook group.

Twenty-four hours later, over a thousand volunteers had signed up and every shift was full.

From there, the structure scaled in days. The original six supervisors trained twenty more. The day shift ran with 15 to 20 volunteers, the night shift with 6 to 8. Around a hundred volunteers worked the centre each day.

The roster split into two streams. The door team handled first contact: queue numbers, procedure explanation, hot coffee, snacks, and emotional support during waits that could run from 30 minutes to 5 hours. A second team handled personalised problem-solving: arranging warm clothes, connecting refugees to donation centres, sourcing strollers and walking frames, and helping people navigate to their first accommodation.

In the second week, the team opened shifts at a nearby donation centre. Volunteers sorted, packed, and shipped items to central storage and accommodation locations. When supplies of specific items ran low (shampoo, toothpaste), coordinators posted requests through Zelos and volunteers brought what was needed for their next shift.

Zelos handled the schedule and structure. Facebook handled the social side. When the team accidentally created a single large Zelos group chat early on, volunteers requested it be closed and informal interaction returned to Facebook. Zelos remained the operational backbone.

Personal contact was non-negotiable. Coordinators sent reminder messages to every volunteer ahead of their shift, and thank-you emails at the end of each week. Zelos gave the team the structure to keep that human touch at scale, while coordinating a crisis-response volunteer base that grew by the day.

The results

A six-person coordination team mobilised over 2,000 volunteers in a month to serve 7,000+ refugees at the registration centre.

At peak operation, around a hundred volunteers worked the centre each day. Over the two weeks Niine 2 served as Estonia’s primary refugee registration office, at least 7,000 Ukrainian refugees passed through.

On 25 March, the Estonian government opened a larger national registration office in Pärnu, closer to the southern border. The main volume of new arrivals moved there. The Niine 2 office continued to register refugees as needed, with its focus shifting to local and social matters.

Six strangers met in early March. Within a month, they had organised a community of more than 2,000 volunteers. The community continues to coordinate volunteer support for Ukraine and Ukrainian refugees in Estonia.