Over a dozen St. Olaf students gathered donations in support of Ukraine in late February, collecting nearly $1,000 for four different non-profit organizations, after Russian forces launched an invasion into the eastern European country.
The donation drive started with an idea between a few students that quickly turned into a formal effort to foster support. One of these students was Dima Tukan ’22, who helped start a Facebook Messenger group chat and organized tabling in Buntrock Commons. He was in part inspired by peers at Macalester College who organized a similar donation drive.
St. Olaf and Macalester students together donated over $7,000 toward four non-profit organizations: the Come Back Alive Foundation, Voices of Children, Caritas Ukraine, and Red Cross Ukraine. Tukan said that the organizers wanted to ensure that the money they collected would go only toward non-lethal equipment and other aid. The Come Back Alive Foundation, in particular, is a Ukrainian-based organization that funds “purely defensive initiatives,” according to their website, supporting technological equipment like reconnaissance drones and thermal scopes for Ukrainian combat units.
Because international money transfers can often take days to weeks to go through, the organizers at St. Olaf and Macalester used cryptocurrency to transfer the funds to the organizations instead, which Tukan said they accepted “within the next hour.”
Aside from simply collecting money to contribute to aid organizations, the organizers at St. Olaf — often close to a dozen gathered around the table at all times — focused also on informing other St. Olaf students about the status of the war and the importance of their donations.
“A lot of people were coming by and wanting to talk first before they would give the money,” Tukan said. “That was something very encouraging for me because I know people generally cared.”
Awareness about the invasion and about the broader geopolitical context between Ukraine and Russia did not stop at student tabling. Three St. Olaf departments — Russian area and language studies, political science, and international relations — hosted a question-and-answer panel on Wed., March 2, with professors Menevis Cilizoglu in international relations, Anthony Lott in political science, and Anna Kuxhausen and Marc Robinson in Russian area and language studies. The panel packed the Viking Theater full of students, which encouraged Tukan and the other organizers that their drive had engendered more awareness surrounding the war.
Although the organizers have stopped tabling recently, they plan to continue their efforts later as a way to raise awareness again once initial support has subsided. Gathering student meal donations and more tabling are two ways the organizers have considered to re-raise awareness in the future.
“I think one thing we really want to do is to try to set up a conversation table,” Tukan said. “Just to have people come by and not necessarily even update everyone but just have a space where people can talk about it, so that’s something that we’ll probably be working on.”
Continued support for Ukraine can be seen in other ways. Posters representing the Ukrainian flag and reading “Stop the War in Ukraine” have popped up around campus, and Assistant Director for International Student Engagement in the Taylor Center for Equity and Inclusion Megan Carmes has supported St. Olaf students from the two affected countries by connecting them with financial resources and other avenues for assistance.
Links to the four organizations that received donations can be found on the Messenger’s website for those interested in learning more or donating themselves.
