EDITORIAL: 70 years of service (06/23/96)

EDITORIAL

70 years of service

While attending the 24th convention of Ukrainian National Women's League of North America, we were most impressed by the wide array of charitable and community programs the organization has instituted and nurtured in its 70 years of existence.

The organization is well-known at the local level as the group that sponsors pre-schools and children's dances, and publishes Our Life (Nashe Zhyttia) magazine. But it does far more than that, a litany of achievements that merits enumeration as UNWLA celebrates its seventh decade.

The group, which was founded in 1925 in New York, aids orphans, widows, the elderly, new immigrants to the United States, and children in various countries of the world, including Ukraine, Brazil, Poland and rump Yugoslavia.

One of its most successful efforts is the UNWLA Scholarship/Student Sponsorship Program, which since 1967 has assisted thousands of pupils and students in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Poland and the U.S. Most recently the program has been expanded to include aid to students in Romania, Croatia and Ukraine.

The UNWLA has spent more than $2 million on such stipends. Merely between 1992 and 1995 it disbursed $443,143.22 in handing out 1,816 awards.

Another noteworthy endeavor was its successful effort, in cooperation with the Children of Chornobyl Relief Fund of Short Hills, N.J., to obtain a magnetic resonance imaging unit for the Kyiv Emergency Hospital and Trauma Center. The organization has also purchased medical equipment and supplies for hospitals in Lviv and in Truskavets in western Ukraine.

Another achievement is the prominent role the UNWLA undertook in organizing The Ukrainian Museum in 1976, and sustaining it since, and today spearheading the effort to raise funds to provide a larger and more suitable home for its holdings. There is also the Petro and Lesia Kovaliv Fund, a stipend awarded for excellence for literary/historical works.

Then there is the UNWLA Pen Pal Center, established in 1974, sponsorship of 13 Social Welfare Centers in sister-cities in Ukraine, and the St. John's Day Care Center in Newark N.J. The list goes on and on.

The accomplishments of the UNWLA are less known than those of organizations that are more geared to self-promotion, or that maintain that self-promotion equates with self-survival. While other organizations herald each accomplishment with what might as well be a fanfare of trumpet blasts and streaming confetti, the UNWLA has gone about its work with quiet efficiency. Its resources are aimed strictly at the task at hand.

One thing could stifle this organization's dedication to selfless giving - natural attrition. Like most other established Ukrainian American organizations, the average age of the membership continues to increase. As older members leave or pass away, they are not being replaced with a younger, more vital force. UNWLA President Anna Krawczuk acknowledges that this is a problem that must be addressed by the UNWLA. She said during the convention that the move by the group to develop a home page on the Internet will be an effort to reach out and recruit young Ukrainian women.

This is absolutely a move in the right direction, because as she admits, as Ukrainians disperse around the U.S., they are not found as often in traditional meeting places for Ukrainian Americans (e.g. around the church), where they can be spurred to join. They must be reached through the communication vehicle of the 21st century.

However, the UNWLA must also make it attractive for younger women to become active, they must be brought into leadership positions and given real authority. If they are only to watch from the sidelines, why should they join the team? We do commend the UNWLA on taking an initial step in this direction with the election of a young professional to the newly established ecology chair.

UNWLA member Melanne Verveer, who is deputy assistant to U.S. President Bill Clinton and deputy chief of staff to First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, perhaps summed up the UNWLA's efforts in a presentation she gave at the convention, where she quoted the first lady from a speech delivered in India. "Give a woman a seed and she will plant it, she will water it and nurture it and then reap it, share its fruits, and finally she will replant it." We applaud the UNWLA for 70 years of service to the community and to the world, and also wish it luck in nurturing its own seed in the future.

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