Svitlana Cernoia moved to Australia in 2012 and has lived in Mount Isa since 2019 and is now helping to relocate Ukrainian families who fled their country to seek safety in Australia.

As the war passes its 100^th day, Ms Cernoia has raised $4800 through a number of cooking and baking fundraisers with the assistance and support of her employer, Mount Isa City Council,

Ms Cernoia said when the war started on February 24 she had a meeting with council CEO David Keenan to discuss fundraising options.

"I decided to do a cook up of Ukrainian food and sell it to those at council and then my colleague suggested it would be a good idea for every culture to participate in the cook up. So during April, each week, we had two sales of different multicultural food, including Italian, Filipino, New Zealand and Ukrainian; as well as a bake sale," she said.

"My goal was to raise $4000, I was surprised when it reach $3900 and we hadn't even had the bake sale yet. The staff here at council are all very talented and we all have a very good appetite.

"I am so lucky that I am working here, it is my first job in Australia, before I was raising my kids, and from the beginning I had such a big support and that has continued especially now trying to raise money."

Ms Cernoia said the funds raised would be donated to the Ukrainian Community of Queensland in Brisbane to directly relocate Ukrainian refugees into Queensland.

"A lot of Ukrainian people are coming to Australia as tourists and then getting humanitarian visa issued from the Australian Government. The Ukrainian Community of Queensland are then working to relocate them into Queensland," she said.

"I am also an administrator and have helped relocate four families to Townsville, and there are many more people in Brisbane."

Ms Cernoia said she had also assisted with the relocation of a distant cousin to Mount Isa.

"She arrived in town last Sunday, she arrived alone because her husband and son had to stay in Ukraine, but she is doing well," she said.

"She is learning English, has applied for a humanitarian Visa and she is currently looking for volunteer work to help better her English. She does speak very well but it can be difficult to understand Australian language. My kids are helping her a lot and she has been going to the library for English lessons.

"She said on the fourth day, 'finally I'm not crying'. We all process and manage danger differently."

Ms Cernoia said it was a worrying feeling knowing her family continued to live in Ukraine.

"This war started for us in 2014 because I am from Luhansk which has been occupied by Russia since that time. My mum and brother lost everything and had to move to the other side of Ukraine. In Ukraine it is not very common to rent, most people own property and we lost our family house. My mother moved east to Lviv and my brother moved to Kyiv," she said.

"Thankfully I have maintained contact with family. I was so stressed out and I was relying on messages and still trying to work through social media. I saw all these Ukrainian groups on Facebook trying to spread information about how to escape from attacks and I was forwarding that information to family, so I still felt heavily involved.

"My brother wanted to fight from the beginning but was not accepted into the Ukrainian army, so he helped by evacuating people out of Kyiv."

She said her family were still safe but they expect the war to continue until the end of this year.

"The worst case scenario is the war will continue into next year, maybe another year. The good scenario is if weapons come from United States and European countries in time there will be a big battle in August and the active phase of this war will finish in September.

"The middle scenario, that we think will happen, it may last until December. Because this is the biggest war for the last 70-80 years and technologies are different and no one had a war with these technologies. But not only war on the land, the biggest war is happening in the media, because Russia propaganda is very strong and I had to learn a lot about it to understand how people can be brainwashed and influenced and protect my family."

Ms Cernoia thanked all of the Council staff who had donated to supporting Ukraine refugees and she hoped to plan another fundraiser in the near future.

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