Dolores County Artist Returns from Ukraine After Supporting Wounded Soldiers

Suzanne Horwich had already crossed into the war's shadow before. She made her first trip to Krakow, Poland in May 2022, then returned five more times to work with Ukrainian refugees. This time, she went further: into Ukraine itself, working directly with soldiers recovering from wounds sustained in the conflict with Russia. She returned last week.

Horwich, a Nebraska native who founded the nonprofit Artists Giving Back, built her program around a conviction that healing through creative expression addresses needs that food and shelter cannot. Her model targets what she calls the secondary needs of people in crisis: emotional recovery, dignity, and the ability to imagine something beyond survival. In Ukraine, that mission landed inside military medical settings, where soldiers injured in the ongoing war were working through recovery, with Horwich facilitating art as part of that process.

Artists Giving Back partners with organizations worldwide that are meeting the primary needs of refugees such as food, shelter and medicine, and has observed in refugee crisis situations that the secondary needs are often overlooked. The work with wounded soldiers in Ukraine represents a direct extension of that philosophy into a military context.

Horwich formally founded Artists Giving Back as a nonprofit and recruited a board of directors after growing the effort from a solo operation into a registered organization with international reach. Prior missions have taken the group to Greece, where African and Middle Eastern refugees were served alongside its Eastern European work.

The scale of need in Ukraine remains staggering. In August 2025, the National Institute of Strategic Studies reported that the National Health Service of Ukraine recorded 95,000 amputations carried out on military personnel and civilians. Art therapy alone cannot answer that toll, but Horwich has argued consistently that addressing the emotional and creative interior of people in crisis is not supplemental work. It is the work.

Her return to Dolores County last week closes one chapter of the trip, not the mission itself. Artists Giving Back has continued expanding its reach with each successive deployment, and Ukraine, where the war shows no signs of resolution, remains a central focus.