EDITORIAL: The UNWLA's 75th anniversary (03/12/00)

EDITORIAL

The UNWLA's 75th anniversary

The year 2000 marks an important milestone in the history of the pre-eminent Ukrainian women's organization in the United States: the 75th anniversary of the Ukrainian National Women's League of America.

It is a proud organization with an illustrious history and a promising future.

The UNWLA, also known as Soyuz Ukrainok, was founded in 1925 in New York City by five women's associations whose goal was to create a unified nationwide organization. As noted in its 1999 convention book, the UNWLA's paramount goal was, and is, to preserve Ukrainian identity, culture and heritage within the framework of a humanitarian organization. During its seven and a half decades of existence, the UNWLA has always worked for the benefit of Ukrainian communities in the United States and the diaspora, as well as for fellow Ukrainians in Ukraine.

Soyuz Ukrainok has accomplished its goals both through its own membership and via other organizations in which it is active, whether the Ukrainian World Congress and the World Federation of Ukrainian Women's Organizations, or the National Council of Women, International Council of Women and the General Federation of Women's Clubs.

The UNWLA has cared for the well-being of the younger generation by organizing preschools and day-care centers, and by providing much-needed assistance to orphans. It has helped needy students acquire higher education through its Scholarship-Student Sponsorship Program, which was formally initiated in 1967, although the first scholarship was awarded decades earlier, in 1932. Today that program can boast of having helped more than 800 students in 17 countries, from Poland, Brazil and Argentina, to Romania and Ukraine.

The UNWLA has cared also for the infirm, the elderly, widows and disaster victims. Its first medical fund was instituted in 1930. Victims of the Great Famine in Ukraine, wartime refugees, victims of the Chornobyl nuclear accident and, most recently, residents of flood-ravaged Zakarpattia in western Ukraine all have benefited from the UNWLA's charitable assistance.

Since 1944 the organization has published Our Life (Nashe Zhyttia), a magazine that keeps members in touch and informed about the activity of Soyuz Ukrainok. However, its publishing activity also includes histories, compilations of literary works, as well as books on subjects from education to art and the environment. The UNWLA has now set up a website (www.unwla.org) that features information about the organization, including membership, publications, programs, events, etc.

It was the UNWLA that in 1976 founded The Ukrainian Museum in New York. But the organization's activity in this sphere dates back to at least 1926 when it organized the first exhibit of Ukrainian folk arts and crafts in New York City.

Among its current projects, UNWLA leaders point to recently initiated lobbying efforts aimed at persuading the U.S. government to change its immigration and labor laws in order to allow women from Ukraine to legally come to the United States as temporary workers.

This year the UNWLA has launched its "Milk and Buns Project" aimed at helping needy children in Ukraine. The organization has received many letters from Ukraine noting that in some areas of the country children faint from hunger because parents don't have the money to pay for breakfast in school. The UNWLA explains that children are the future of Ukraine and that is why they should be our priority. As usual, Soyuz Ukrainok came up with a concrete way to offer assistance. It has adopted two schools - one in Kharkiv and one in Lviv - as their pilot project. The first to receive assistance will be the neediest children in the earliest grades: first, second and third.

Currently the 75-year-old organization is actively seeking women of the younger generations, as well as recent immigrants, to join its ranks and become active in its myriad programs involving culture, charitable work, education, social welfare, the arts, ecology and more - all worthwhile endeavors deserving of support.

We take our hats off to the UNWLA as it celebrates its jubilee. We wish it "Mnohaya Lita" - many, many more years of fruitful and necessary work for the benefit of our Ukrainian community and the entire Ukrainian nation.

Slava Soyuziankam!

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