1993: THE YEAR IN REVIEW: Ukraine aid: private sector dominates (12/26/93)

1993: THE YEAR IN REVIEW

Ukraine aid: private sector dominates

Whereas previous years saw the Ukrainian community galvanizing assistance projects to Ukraine, in 1993 government-sponsored programs and the private sector dominated in the aid to Ukraine arena. With the diaspora's leading community organizations and Ukraine-aid foundations loosing steam in the face of Ukraine's overwhelming number of needs, new, smaller organizations, and organizations not previously bitten by the aid to Ukraine bug, cropped up to pursue narrowly defined projects. Some organizations, like the Sabre Foundation, The Project on Economic Reform in Ukraine (PERU) and the Soros Foundation expanded their assistance repertoire, while others dropped off into obscurity.

In the medical sphere, assistance programs set up in 1991 and 1992 bore fruit in 1993. The American International Health Alliance (AIHA), a partnership program initiated in 1992 between hospitals in the United States and the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union, concluded the year with 22 partnerships, four with hospitals in Ukraine.

Funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and participating hospitals in the U.S., the AIHA's goal is to counter the economic dislocation and breakdown of centralized health care in former Soviet republics by facilitating exchanges between senior hospital administrators, physicians, nurses and technical specialists in the U.S. with their counterparts in the newly independent states.

The largest of Ukraine's partnerships, between Kyyiv's Ukrainian State Medical University and the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center (including the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and the School of Medicine), focuses on combating high infant mortality, neonatal asphyxia, problem pregnancies, low levels of pre- and post-natal care and ways to improve family planning. The Kyyiv-Philadelphia partnership includes the two hospitals' affiliates: in Kyyiv, Children's Hospital No. 2 and Obstetrical Hospital No. 3, in Philadelphia, the School of Nursing of the University of Pennsylvania and Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

The Odessa Oblast Hospital and the Coney Island Hospital and Maimonides Medical Center partnership targets the areas of emergency services, hospital management and health care financing as well as new diagnostic and treatment technologies in urology, neonatology, ophthalmology and orthopedic surgery.

The pairing of Lviv Oblast Hospital with Henry Ford Health Systems of Detroit and Kaiser Foundation Health Plan of Ohio focuses on the prevention and treatment of rheumatic heart disease. The Lviv Railway Oblast Hospital-Millard Fillmore Hospital of Buffalo, N.Y., partnership emphasizes improving performance in immunology, obstetrics and the prevention of asphyxia among the newborn.

The AIHA program for the newly independent states has been funded by Congress until the middle of 1994 and in the future will expand to former East-Bloc countries.

Throughout the year, Elwyn Inc., in conjunction with the Fund of Ukraine for the Protection of Invalids and Ukraine's Ministry of Social Welfare, laid the groundwork for its two-year Early Intervention Model Demonstration Program in Mykolayiv.

Elwyn, the nation's oldest, private non-profit organization for people with disabilities, will employ speech, physical and occupational therapists and a psychologist to identify children with physical and mental disabilities, provide them and their families with education and therapeutic support, and initiate an education program to help encourage community-wide understanding and acceptance of children with disabilities in order for them to reach their fullest potential.

Funded in part by USAID, the demonstration program will develop a system of evaluation and diagnosis of newborns, provide classroom instruction to 450 children, deliver parent and home training for 92 families and train 120 Ukrainian professionals to replicate the program, beginning in early 1994.

The Medical Clinic on Wheels, conceived in 1991 by Dr. Stephen Dudiak and his wife, Lusia, of Madison, Wis., and funded by the "Thoughts of Faith" Lutheran ministry, continued to roll in Ternopil Oblast during 1993. The two mobile units providing medical and dental services to Chornobyl children and patients in rural and urban regions are staffed by health practitioner volunteers from the United States, who train local physicians to staff the mobile clinics and use the equipment and supplies.

The project also provides medical equipment and supplies, educational tools, books, videotapes and instructors to pediatric and obstetric hospitals.

Yarema Harabatch and his organization, UkraineAid, continued to facilitate shipments of medical supplies to Ukraine via chapters of the Bavarian Red Cross for the second year running. This year, three deliveries of medicine, hospital equipment, dry food and clothing were delivered to Truskavets, a western Ukrainian city known for its health spas, via truck convoys organized by the Miltenberg-Obernburg chapter of the Bavarian Red Cross.

Economic hardships and the publicized plight of Ukraine's overwhelmed orphanage system gave rise to two orphan aid groups in 1993. The Orphan Aid Society, coordinated by Raisa Hotz of the All-Ukrainian Women's Hromada based in Kyyiv and Maria Yowyk of New York, sponsors a Ukrainian orphan for $15 per month. Conceived in 1992, the society sponsored its first child in September of this year and to date sponsors over 100 children.

"Help Us Help the Children...We Are Their Future," organized under the auspices of the Children of Chornobyl Canadian Fund earlier this year, made a three-year commitment to assist Ukraine's orphanages and children's hospital by donating medical supplies, vitamins, vaccines, food, clothing and toys. In the spring Help Us Help the Children donated $100,000 worth of humanitarian goods to Ukrainian orphanages. Having raised an additional $500,000, the group returned to Ukraine in the fall, delivering nine tons of supplies donated mostly by Canadian pharmaceutical companies to 16 orphanages. In May 1994 Help Us Help the Children, which has expanded to include medical professionals, plans to return to Ukraine with 50 tons of medical and humanitarian supplies valued at $5 million (Canadian) for 10,000 children living in 60 orphanages.

The Massachusetts-Ukraine Citizens Bridge launched its "Bridging Families" program in the fall, which assists Ukrainian families with donations of non-perishable items while developing relationships between Ukrainian and American cultures. Participants include family information and a photo in their package; shipping costs cover response card postage for Ukrainian families to write back to their American sponsors.

Sister-city relationships between Ukraine and the U.S. thrived in 1993, solidifying ties between Bohudukhiv and Boyertown, Pa.; Cherkasy and Santa Rosa, Calif.; Kaniv and Sonoma, Calif.; Kharkiv and Cincinnati, Ohio; Ternopil and Yonkers, N.Y.; Kolomyia and El Cajon, Calif., and Poltava and Irondequoit, N.Y.

Ukraine's farmers got a leg up through two different agricultural assistance programs in the U.S. and Canada. In April 100 American farmers traveled to Ukraine as part of Operation Farm Ukraine '93 to assist their Ukrainian counterparts with spring planting on approximately 1,000 farms totaling 500,000 acres. In addition to farming instruction, Operation Farm Ukraine '93, a joint venture between ICI Seeds of West Des Moines, Iowa, and Zemlya and Lyudi, a Ukrainian agricultural firm and designated representative of Ukraine's Ministry of Agriculture, calls for a first year Ukrainian purchase of up to $70 million worth of U.S. technology and manufactured agricultural goods, including hybrid corn seeds and agro-chemicals from ICI, and state of the art planters, sprayers and harvesters manufactured by leading America companies. Financing for the Ukrainian purchase was arranged by Citibank New York and guaranteed by U.S. Eximbank.

The Saskatchewan Provincial Council of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress this year took over a farming work-study program begun by the Ukrainian Resource and Development Center at Grant MacEwan Community College in Edmonton in 1991. The program teaches Ukrainian farmers about the agricultural industry in Canada for a six-month period, focusing on industry tours of dairy plants, apiaries, abattoirs, wholesale distributors and agricultural equipment manufacturers. The program is funded primarily by George Soros through the Karl Popper Foundation of Switzerland.

Small-scale instructional exchanges highlighted assistance to Ukraine programs in 1993.

Two Ukrainian foresters traveled to the U.S. this summer as part of an ongoing exchange between the Ukrainian State Agricultural University and the Pennsylvania State College of Agricultural Sciences. Dr. Anatoly Strochinsky, a forest biometrician and dean of USAU's department of forestry, and Vasily Ribak, director of the university's 45,000-acre Boyarska Experimental forest, visited Penn States' diverse forestry-related operations and learned about private enterprise, technological advances in wood processing and the marketing of secondary wood products. The exchange was sponsored by the Penn State Center for Ukrainian Agriculture, funded in large part through a donation of the Alex Woskob family of State College, Pa.

Four Ukrainian museum professionals also traveled to the U.S. this summer to participate in a four-and-a-half week series of museum-related activities and instruction in New York, Boston and Newark, Del. Sponsored by the Soros Foundation through its Kyyiv affiliate, the Renaissance Foundation, the four museum experts met with staff of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Christie's Auction House in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and participated in a three-and-a-half week Collections Care Training Program at the University of Delaware, a hands-on course for museum professionals working with historical collections.

Five Ukrainian interns studied the credit union movement at Ukrainian credit unions in New York, Yonkers, Rochester, Newark and Passaic, N.J., this summer under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Commerce SABIT program, the Ukrainian National Credit Union Association, the World Council of Credit Unions and the Ukrainian government.

Under the auspices of the Gund Foundation International Law Center at Case Western Reserve Law School, an Ohio delegation representing the Ohio Supreme Court, the Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court, the Ohio Judicial Conference, the Ohio State Bar Association, Case Western Reserve Law School and members of the Ukrainian American legal community traveled to Kyyiv, Lviv and Kharkiv this summer as an outgrowth of the Ohio-Ukraine Judicial Program that was started by a consortium of Ohio judges, law schools and organizations in 1990. This summer's exchange follows last summer's visit to Ohio of representatives from Ukraine's Supreme Court, the law department of the Secretariat of Ukraine's Parliament, the Union of Lawyers of Ukraine and Ukrainian law professors.

Through the Ohio-Ukraine Judicial Program, an ongoing project to assist fledgling democracies of the former Soviet Union develop independent judicial systems, Case Western Reserve Law School will host Prof. Eugene T. Roulko of the Institute of International Relations at Kyyiv University as a visiting professor in the spring of 1994 and enroll two Ukrainian students next fall.

Ukrainian American Veteran Post 27 of Brooklyn, N.Y., joined the aid to Ukraine bandwagon in 1993 by launching a training program for Ukrainian bankers and lawyers at the American Institute of Banking of Greater New York. The program proposes bringing 60 Ukrainians with experience in banking and finance to the U.S. for three weeks of intensive classroom study, including meetings with officials from the largest U.S. banks and visits to the New York and American Stock Exchanges. The project is awaiting funding from the Eurasia Foundation, a privately managed, non-profit, grant-making organization established in 1993 with financing from USAID.

A veteran of assistance to Ukraine projects, the Sabre Foundation of Cambridge, Mass., launched two projects in 1993. The first, underwritten by the William H. Donner Foundation of New York, will translate and publish basic business books into the Ukrainian language to assist the growing number of entrepreneurs and small business people active in Ukraine. Sabre will coordinate the project and negotiate rights agreements with U.S. and British publishers while its Ukrainian partner, Sabre-Svitlo, will be responsible for translating, editing, printing and distributing the books throughout Ukraine. The books will cover basic economics, marketing, budgeting, finance and human resources and will be published in 1994.

The second, the Scientific Assistance Project, will provide technical assistance and training in computer-available resources for selected institutions in Ukraine. The project, founded by the National Endowment for Democracy, will tap available resources on thousands of computer networks interconnected on Internet and assist institutions already possessing e-mail capabilities by providing information on how to gain access to files, texts, bibliographic entries, lists of Internet sites, lists of directories and software available on Internet.

Another aid to Ukraine veteran, the Project on Economic Reform in Ukraine, laid the groundwork for the International Reform Institute of Ukraine, a collaborative project between PERU, Ukrainian policymakers and academics funded by a grant from Citizens Corp., a for-profit holding company owned by Citizens Energy. The institute, once fully operational, will place advisors in the Ukrainian government to assist the development and implementation of economic reform programs, teach intensive courses on topics of reform to policymakers, support research on Ukraine's economy and provide a library and information services.

At the beginning of the year, The National Forum Foundation launched its American Volunteers for International Development (AVID) program, which recruits qualified Americans to work with their professional counterparts in government and independent media throughout Central and Eastern Europe and Ukraine. Funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, Pew Charitable Trusts and the Office of Citizen Exchanges of the United States Information Agency (USIA), the program promotes the region's transformation to a free political and economic system and is a natural extension of the NFF's Central and Eastern European Internship Program. The CEEIP program, which brings visiting fellows from former East Bloc countries and Ukraine, hosting two fellows from Ukraine earlier this year.

The Citizens Democracy Corps based in Washington announced in early 1993 that it will begin implementing its assistance programs for Ukraine and appointed Steve Piwtorak, a Ukrainian American from Troy, Mich., to establish and direct operations in Kyyiv. The CDC targeted three assistance programs for Ukraine: the Corporate Assistance Program, which will enlist executives of Fortune 500 corporations, non-profit organizations and universities to provide long-term, high-level priority needs; the Business Entrepreneur Program, which will target business needs to small and medium-size companies; and the Citizen Volunteer Program, which recruits teams of volunteers to participate in long-term institution-building projects such as public administration and higher education.

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