Ukraine bound

Keep us in your thoughts and prayers

When we sprung into action in the first week of the war, all we wanted was to do something rather than watch the tragedy unfold in the news. We ended up being able to help thousands.

The tragedy resonates with me not only because we have lived in both Moscow and Kyiv, and our daughters were born in both Ukraine and Russia. I too have experienced the agony of being a refugee with zero certainty about the future as a 5-year-old in a UN refugee camp in Santiago, Chile followed by exile in Germany, Russia, and Mozambique.

In the first days of the war, we discovered to our horror, that all of our many dear friends in Ukraine were in bomb shelters or fleeing to safety. We started the Ukraine Relief Network simply to connect people and organizations who wanted to help with a way to instantly and directly help those on the ground. Since those first weeks of what we called the rescue operation phase, we have evolved into a series of specific initiatives, from humanitarian aid to refugees in Eastern Ukraine to art therapy for the children and adults traumatized by the tragedy of war in a rapidly changing landscape of both the war and the humanitarian crisis on the ground.

Photo by Marjan Blan | @marjanblan on Unsplash

My wife Deb and I are leaving for Ukraine to both be present and love up on dear friends and partners in our work there and create new partnerships to build a new Ukraine reborn after the war is over.

Beyond the work of the Ukraine Relief Network, I’ve also been involved with architecting a global response from the music and arts community called We Are Ukraine. It will be a rolling thunder style series of events involving top artists worldwide to raise $1 billion to help rebuild Ukraine.

It’s a journey involving literally planes, trains, and automobiles. If you can, please keep us in your thoughts and prayers. There is much to accomplish, and we’re grateful for the opportunity to be in a position to serve on a higher level than we initially expected.

Thank you for your support, prayers, and partnership! We’ll keep you posted on how things evolve in the coming weeks.