03/03/2026
Do you remember how over the past few months the Washington Ukrainian Humanitarian Center turned holidays and gatherings into lifelines?
We celebrated the New Year together. We organized community bazaars. We hosted master classes - people learning, creating, sharing skills - all with one purpose: to raise funds for defibrillators for evacuation teams and first responders in Ukraine. Because when a heart stops, there are only minutes. And minutes are everything.
And now we have big news. 400 defibrillators are ready to ship.
In a room filled with stacked boxes and the steady sound of packing tape, our tireless volunteers - Suzanne Carbone, Steven Dudzik, Raymond Novak, and Paul Van Akkeren - showed up day after day. They lifted, packed, sorted, and built pallets by hand, because somewhere in Ukraine, an evacuation crew may soon open one of those boxes and use it to save a life.
It’s hard to measure what a community can do from thousands of miles away. But sometimes it looks like this: pallets wrapped and ready to cross an ocean, carrying not just equipment, but the possibility of another heartbeat.
If you’d like to learn more about our work or support future lifesaving shipments, please visit our website www.uhcus.org
