EDITORIAL: A check-up for our community (03/30/03)

EDITORIAL

A check-up for our community

Does anybody remember our Ukrainian community's favorite word of 1999: "synergy"? What ever came of the great ideas of that great Ukrainian mega-gathering, the Joint Conferences of Ukrainian Organizations held that year to promote our community's awareness and utilization of synergy?

The 1999 "synergy conference," as it came to be called for short, was seen as the first of more such gatherings to come. And its concluding session - dubbed "Finding Direction for Our Organizations" - led to the first steps toward creation of a formal entity to be known as the Council of Presidents of Ukrainian American Organizations, a mechanism for regular consultation among our organizations with the aim of increasing the community's effectiveness both internally and in terms of its external relations. We expressed hope that the event, which attracted over 900 people to Washington for five days in June, had provided a new model of cooperation for our organizations - "the synergy that the conference organizers had envisioned." It was an auspicious start. Alas, there was no follow-through (as an old tennis instructor used to say).

Then, in 2002, the Ukrainian Engineers' Society of America seized the initiative and held, well, not another mega-conference, but a Summit of Ukrainian American Organizations. The inaugural summit focused on youth - the next generations who constitute the potential members and leaders of our organizations and institutions, and the key question posed was how do we attract this missing demographic link in our community life? Using a loose brainstorming format, Summit 2002 generated ideas and challenged assumptions; there were no passive listeners. The summit demonstrated that we value and need our "hromada" and that our community can be successful if we establish better contacts among its component parts.

The 2003 Summit of Ukrainian American Organizations, which takes place this weekend at Soyuzivka, addresses the topic "The Ukrainian American Community Today: Who Are We and How Do We Communicate?" It has the makings of a good follow-up to last year's summit and the potential to build on that foundation to really move forward. The keynote speaker is Dr. Oleh Wolowyna, a name familiar to our readers because for decades now he has analyzed our community's demographics. He has argued that in order for us to flourish we need to be aware of certain basic facts: How large is our community? Where do its members reside? What are the characteristics of these Ukrainians Americans - e.g., do they speak Ukrainian, how many are of mixed ancestry, how many have intermarried, what is their household income?

Indeed, it bears repeating that in the decade since the 1990 Census the number of Ukrainians in the U.S. has seen extraordinary growth. In 2000 there were 893,055 of us in this country - a growth of 20.6 percent from 1990. To put it another way, there are 152,252 more Ukrainians living in the U.S. than a decade earlier. Those numbers alone should demonstrate why it is important for our community to use the data gathered by the census - certainly this would be valuable for our organizations' planning.

Participants of the 2003 Summit no doubt are aware that our community's health is not good. Most organizations are losing members; our resorts are threatened; our schools' futures are in question; some of our parishes are in decline, while others need new church buildings to house their growing congregations; our newspapers' readership is on the decline. In fact, what we are witnessing is the very thing that is happening in most older U.S. cities: our infrastructure is crumbling. It must be attended to!

At the same time, our communities have become more insular. The so-called "tsentrali" - our national umbrella organizations - certainly don't have much to brag about as our individual communities have become out of touch with each other and/or some central body. Chicago does not much care what New York does, and neither does Houston. And, it is doubtful that the umbrella organizations really care that, for example, a parochial school in Newark is on the verge of closing or that there is a most vibrant group of community members active in the California Association to Aid Ukraine. Surely this is not a healthy sign. We dare say that our umbrella organizations do not seem concerned about issues that matter to folks on the ground and, therefore, the folks on the ground do not concern themselves with the "tsentrali."

Perhaps, then, what our community needs is something akin to an annual health check-up, a review of where we are, where we are headed, and where we'd like to be years down the road. Summits such as the one being held this weekend have the potential to serve as a venue for such an examination.

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