UCCA - Ukrainian Congress Committee of America

The Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA) is a non-profit, non-partisan community-based organization that has represented the interests of Ukrainians in the United States since 1940. With a National Office in New York City, a bureau in Washington, D.C. and dozens of local grassroots chapters throughout the United States, UCCA’s staff and a nationwide network of volunteers advocate in the name of nearly 2 million Americans of Ukrainian descent. In addition to individual members, UCCA unites nearly 30 national Ukrainian American organizations under one umbrella, the UCCA National Council, consisting of representatives of fraternal, educational, veterans, religious, cultural, social, business, and humanitarian organizations.

For over 77 years, 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 U.S. 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. For over 40 years, the Film Committee of UCCA has provided grants towards Ukrainian documentaries, and has co-produced feature films on topics in Ukraine’s history that remain little known to this day, including the life of Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky and General Roman Shukhevych.

In many ways, the work of Ukrainians in America and our many community organizations is needed more now by our family and friends in Ukraine than in recent memory. Over the past 3 years, UCCA has remained at the forefront of generating aid and action in support of a Ukrainian nation at war. Our decades of work with the United States government affords UCCA and our members greater access to our elected officials, as well as to the government of Ukraine. As Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko stated in 2016, the decades-long efforts of UCCA to “unify the Ukrainian community throughout the United States” are valued highly by the government and people of Ukraine. To those who wish to join the united efforts of UCCA, we ask you to support our work through a yearly membership, and share your voice in promoting closer and deeper ties between the United States and Ukraine.