For over two decades, Iryna Savchenko has started every working day with the same question: what does this child need today? In a frontline city, in the middle of a war, that question has never been more urgent — or more difficult to answer.
Iryna Savchenko is a Ukrainian educator, speech therapist, defectologist, psychologist, and the founder of Baby Brain, a centre for early childhood development and rehabilitation in Zaporizhzhia. With more than 23 years of professional experience working with children who require specialist support, she has built her practice at the intersection of correctional pedagogy, psychology, and physical rehabilitation.
At Baby Brain, Iryna and her team work with children across a wide range of developmental needs — autism spectrum disorders, speech and language delays, cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, and other conditions — combining modern evidence-based methods with deep individual attention to each child and family. The centre has become one of the few places in the Zaporizhzhia region where early intervention, rehabilitation, and psychological support exist under one roof.
"Real change begins the moment one person stops waiting and starts acting."
Since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Iryna has not slowed down. Instead, she has expanded her work, creating new formats of support for internally displaced families, children with special educational needs, and families of military personnel. She has initiated international partnerships, collaborated with charitable foundations and civic organisations, and actively sought grant opportunities to sustain and grow inclusive education in Ukraine.
Now, Iryna is working toward opening the first inclusive kindergarten of a new generation in Zaporizhzhia — a space where early childhood education, early intervention, speech therapy, physical rehabilitation, and psychological support are fully integrated. In a frontline city, this is not simply a childcare project. It is an act of conviction: that children deserve stability, development, and the conditions to simply be children, regardless of what is happening around them.
Beyond her work at Baby Brain, Iryna serves as a regional manager for the Agency of Mass Sports of Ukraine in the Zaporizhzhia region, where she leads sporting initiatives, inclusive camps, and movement-based recovery programmes for children. For Iryna, the link between physical activity, psychological resilience, and developmental progress is not theoretical — it is something she has observed and built upon for years in her daily practice.
What drives Iryna Savchenko is a belief that culture, education, sport, and rehabilitation are not separate domains but dimensions of the same thing: the conditions that allow a child to grow. In her vision, the inclusive kindergarten she is building is not just a facility — it is a model, one she hopes can be replicated across Ukraine and contribute to a broader shift in how society understands childhood, disability, and possibility.
She wants the world to know that even in a frontline city, under constant threat, people are building the future — not waiting for it. That is the story of Baby Brain. And it is, in many ways, the story of Ukraine right now.