Before joining the Peace Corps, it had always been Kate’s dream to immerse herself in a foreign culture and gain fluency in another language. She went on to serve in Ukraine from 2010 to 2011, when her Peace Corps service ended early due to unforeseen circumstances.
The day that Kate found out she was leaving Ukraine early was one of the worst of her life. She was terrified to lose her connection with Ukraine. Kate mentioned that she wishes she could hug that heartbroken 24-year-old and tell her, “We kept our connection to Ukraine stronger than ever.” That younger version of Kate could never have imagined her future trajectory, and she’d be really proud to have honored her dream.
After Kate’s service, she went on to get a master’s degree in Peacebuilding and Conflict Transformation at the SIT Graduate Institute, whose precursor (the Experiment in International Living) served as one of the first training centers for Peace Corps volunteers in the 1960s. SIT has maintained a close connection with the Peace Corps to this day. In Kate’s cohort of about 100 grad students, there were nearly a dozen RPCVs. When Kate started her program in September 2013, she focused on peacebuilding in Ukraine. If you’ve followed the timeline of Ukraine’s last decade closely, there was little inkling that there was going to be conflict in Ukraine at that time.
After graduation, Kate wasn’t able to find work in anything related to peace and conflict. Instead, she landed a job that resulted in over seven years of building her career in government affairs and advocacy, specifically patient advocacy for people with kidney disease. Looking back on the last decade, Kate explained that it’s astounding, how all of these disparate strands of her life felt so separate, right up until February 24, 2022.
Ukraine Memories
Kate was a TEFL volunteer in a small town in the north of Rivne Oblast, in the fields and forests of the Polissya region. She’s been assured by her Ukrainian friends that she’s deeply biased, but she firmly believes this part of Ukraine is the most beautiful.
Kate has two favorite memories, and they’re actually more recent than her Peace Corps service, but they both have shaped her relationship to Ukraine in the last few years. The first is from when she spent three weeks in Ukraine in 2019. She stayed in Kyiv for the last few days of her trip, and the day before she left, she took a stroll down Khreshchatyk. It was a weekend, and the city had shut down the street for pedestrians. It was filled with musicians and artists, families and friends. She found herself drifting to stand by a piano that had been wheeled out into the street where a man playing was singing beautiful Ukrainian folk songs. She stood there in a semi-circle of Ukrainians, with her heart full, knowing she was leaving the next day and thinking, “I love this place and these people.” Little did she know that this would be one of her last memories of Ukraine before the full-scale invasion.
Her other favorite memory is from September 2023, when she went back to Ukraine for the first time since the invasion. She recalls how she had been so scared that she would never be able to return to Ukraine again, and the relief and euphoria she felt when her bus crossed the border into Ukraine from Poland. Seeing the sun rising over the fields of Volyn Oblast, she burst into tears right there on the bus. Kate feels that Ukraine is truly one of the places that makes her heart feel lightest.
A Deeply Rooted Love
When we asked Kate to describe her love for Ukraine, Kate answered, “This is a question Ukrainians always ask me, both in the United States and in Ukraine, and I struggle to truly articulate my feelings for Ukraine. My love for Ukraine is complex.” Kate explains that when she was in the Peace Corps, living outside her own cultural context was incredibly potent. Every emotion in Ukraine was magnified, even though she’s aware it was likely from culture shock. During her year living in Ukraine, she struggled with euphoria from the highs and mental health issues from the lows. Somewhere in those months sequestered away in the fields and forests of her community, she found herself. She discovered a stronger, wiser, tougher version of herself in Ukraine. She grew.
Kate described how she loves Ukraine because there’s nothing like walking through a sweeping field on the steppe and seeing the endless sky during the Ukrainian summer. She loves Ukraine because Ukrainian is a musical and brilliant Gordian knot of a language, always with a new challenge ahead, from the grammatical rules to the slang to how fast some Ukrainians speak.
She loves Ukraine because the country brought her additional family. Kate has developed a sister-like relationship with her former counterpart, and her host family has welcomed her into their home time after time.
She loves Ukraine because you can never predict how your day will go. Sometimes you end up at a concert you didn’t even know was occurring, other times you end up in the forest eating shashlik because someone saw you walking and offered you some.
Kate loves Ukraine because she has traveled through many of the Oblasts and met Ukrainians from so many backgrounds, and they have all been warm, welcoming, and proud of their country. Kate has even passed this love of Ukraine on to her non-Ukrainian parents. This is the Peace Corps’ Third Goal: to increase Americans’ understanding of other cultures and peoples.
Mobilizing for Ukraine
Kate spent the first week of the full-scale invasion in shocking grief, watching other RPCVs rally on Facebook and feeling as though she didn’t have a useful skill set to help, like working in humanitarian aid or supply chain logistics. However, reality pierced her brain fog, and she realized that advocacy is a critical skill, especially in the United States.
Kate created a detailed shared document on how to engage in advocacy for Ukraine and sent the document to anyone who would listen. Somewhere around the end of the first week of the invasion, she was connected with people at the organization, Razom, who were putting together an advocacy team. Kate worked with others in Razom to build an advocacy program from scratch–a massive undertaking and one of Kate’s proudest accomplishments. In July 2022, Kate left her job and was officially hired by Razom to run their grassroots advocacy program.
While working at Razom, one of the many initiatives she spearheaded was growing the American Coalition for Ukraine, a small coalition of organizations allied around advocacy on behalf of Ukraine. Kate helped organize the first two Ukraine Action Summits in Washington, D.C.. The coalition had grown to more than 60 organizations by the time she left Razom to work with the American Coalition for Ukraine. The coalition now consists of over 100 organizations. 
Kate is incredibly proud of how much the coalition has grown since she began her work with them back in July 2022. Kate, who is currently on the Board of Directors for the American Coalition for Ukraine, has a lofty vision for the coalition. She believes their work will be relevant for decades to come, even if the full-scale invasion were to end tomorrow.
Looking ahead, Kate believes that Ukraine will need our help with rebuilding, acquiring security guarantees, and improving the international community’s mechanisms for preventing conflict and genocide. Kate is in that fight for the long haul. This is how Kate’s experiences in the Peace Corps and her career of advocacy combine post service into the intent of the Peace Corps’ Third Goal.
The RPCV Alliance for Ukraine board is grateful to Kate for spearheading the organization’s advocacy efforts for our members and Ukraine. Kate will be hosting quarterly advocacy calls or events with the Alliance. The goal is to share resources and provide training in critical advocacy skills and best practices from the professional advocacy community.
It has been Kate’s personal goal over the past two years to integrate more RPCVs into the coalition’s advocacy work. RPCVs make great advocates because many view their country of service as a second home.