Uniting Ukrainian Americans

Since 1940, UCCA has enabled the Ukrainian-American community to generate the political capital and momentum needed to aid the people of Ukraine. During World War II, that included such measures as a Ukrainian-American war bond drive of $5,000,000, organizing aid for Ukrainian war victims and refugees, rallying parishes and community centers towards blood drives, and advocating for the passage of the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, which allowed for more than 200,000 persons to enter the US, nearly half of whom were Ukrainians. Additionally, the UCCA has enabled Ukrainian-Americans to:

• publish the first English-language scholarly journal devoted to Ukraine, The Ukrainian Quarterly, every year since 1944;
• raise public awareness of Soviet oppression by helping establish Captive Nations Week in 1959;
• erect a permanent monument to Taras Shevchenko in our nation’s capital in 1964;
• create the Council on Aid to Ukrainians to disseminate educational materials to Ukrainians throughout the world, in 1989;
• co-found the Central and East European Coalition with other national ethnic advocacy groups in 1994;
• establish a US Committee for Ukrainian Holodomor Genocide Awareness, and the eventual unveiling of the National Ukrainian Holodomor Genocide Memorial in Washington, D.C. in 2015

UCCA led nationwide actions in the lead up to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990, and conducted the first ever international Election Observer Missions in an independent Ukraine. UCCA remains the only community organization that has sent a delegation of election observers to every Ukrainian presidential and parliamentary election, the largest consisting of over 2500 observers during the historic 2004 Orange Revolution. Moreover, UCCA organizes academic conferences throughout the United States, and regularly empowers representatives of the Ukrainian-American community to be quoted by print and television journalists when discussing events in Ukraine. The Film Committee of UCCA has provided grants towards documentaries showing the true history of Ukraine, and has co-produced feature films on the lives of Stepan Bandera (1995), General Roman Shukhevych (2000), Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky (2008), and Symon Petliura (2018).

UCCA is not built as a humanitarian aid organization, but by leveraging its members and partners, since February 2022, UCCA has raised the necessary funds and deliver goods to support Ukraine’s war effort. UCCA has been a fundraiser, a mobilizer, a logistics provider and has been able to utilize its long-time trusted contacts from the Ukrainian government to deliver what is needed by the Ukrainian people NOW.