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Drawing on interview data collected at the beginning of the refugee response in the Czech Republic between February and June of 2022, our findings suggest that NGOs face capacity and governance challenges and that these system-level barriers inhibit NGO resilience in responding effectively to the Ukrainian refugee crisis. Despite these barriers, NGOs acted with flexibility and agility in delivering humanitarian assistance to Ukrainian refugees in the first few months of the crisis. Our findings also identify several resilience strategies NGOs utilise to grow their capacity to respond quickly to crises in an uncertain governance environment. We build upon the existing literature on NGO resilience in migration events by contributing new knowledge about how this plays out in the Ukrainian refugee crisis in the Czech context. The ability to collect data at the beginning of the crisis allows us to observe the dynamics of NGOs' resilience during the first significant peak of arrivals and provides an opportunity to gather novel insights about how socially relevant goals can be achieved despite an ambiguous governance environment. Our approach also allows us to understand the issue of organisational resilience in the broader context of recurrent severe crisis periods. By focusing on NGO leaders' perceptions of their organisations' resilience in responding to the Ukrainian refugee crisis, the pandemic crisis, and the more temporally distant Syrian refugee crisis, we can present a narrative of NGO capacity-building during crises within a relatively hostile and non-cooperative institutional environment.