My story

Site

Hi there! My name is Natalia, I am a co-founder of the Green Country network of English language schools for children, which is part of the Green Forest Family.

Prior to the war, we taught more than 4,000 students each semester across the country and beyond. We dreamed with the team and came up with the idea of ​​our startup TalkEn.cloud – an online platform for teaching English, which would help teachers make their lessons even more interesting, modern and digital. And I’m not talking about our own textbooks, which we, together with famous Ukrainian illustrators, published every semester and in January 2022 finally finished the last book №46. In this project, we have invested a significant portion of Green Country’s profits – an average of $ 7,000 per month for the past 5 years, because we strongly believed in TalkEn.Cloud. And there were plans for a spring corporate party for everyone: teachers, administrators, methodologists and leaders (200+ people from different parts of the country), we discussed options, debated which resort to choose and which games to play and bought tickets to Krakow and Venice. Happy.

The events of February changed everything. Because of the war, my team, which I had been assembling for years and became part of a large family, was scattered around the world: some went abroad, some still remain in Ukraine, but almost no one stays in their own home.

The first two weeks were disturbing. I didn’t understand what to do and how to put myself and the team together. But these people and their families, like all our students, are my responsibility, so two weeks later we started a series of free classes to give children a sense of stability and opportunity to communicate with peers, as well as return to full-time distance learning. In two weeks, the class was attended by 1,500+ students. Our marketers have created an SMM team that has waged a real information war and brought together hundreds of creatives from different companies around our goal: “Victory and a peaceful sky above our heads.” The TalkEn.cloud team has continued its work and is now actively working on rebranding, updating the site, mobile application to provide teachers and methodologists who develop additional materials and exercises. Also, the team is volunteering, we donate part of the funds from training to help the Armed Forces, my relatives and friends from around the world help raise funds for tactical first aid kits, we hold free workshops for children and parents in Lviv and launched a company to make nutritional bars for our defenders.

I consciously try not to reduce the salary and look for all possible ways to support the company and the team.

What’s in the plans?

• Raise funds to launch in the global market for our online platform for English teachers TalkEn.cloud.
• Reprint all textbooks, because some will remain in schools in Kiyv and Kharkiv (so far, according to my estimates, worth more than 600 thousand UAH).
• I also opened a fundraising fee that you can also join, details here https://www.gofundme.com/f/talkencloud-platform-for-efl-teachers