Helping Ukrainian orphans and others endure the war with a new playground

Matt Blackburn cannot claim a Ukrainian heritage. The president of the Pittsburgh Ukrainian Relief Coalition instead came to love Ukrainians through attending a Carnegie church with his family, and he wants to help that war-torn country. With the collection of professionals, priests and volunteers who serve with him on its board, he is leading an effort to do just that.

PURC formed in March 2022, just a month after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and in its short history it has raised more than $100,000 as a 501(c)(3) charitable organization.  Helping orphans live in a peaceful and caring environment has been its mission and focus. To date it has awarded approximately $85,000, most recently $10,000 to Warm Hands, a Ukrainian arts therapy program for orphans and displaced children at a camp in Zamlynna in northwestern Ukraine near the borders of Poland and Belarus.

Its next grant will fund a playground for special needs children project, and PURC launched a $20,000 drive for it on April 13, coincidentally Holy Thursday this year on the Ukrainian Orthodox calendar. The board will seek donations until May 1.

It all started, Blackburn said, with reading a March 2022 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article about the Rev. Jason Charron, pastor of Holy Trinity Ukrainian Catholic Church in Carnegie, and Allan Sherwood, a Pittsburgh businessman, traveling to Ukraine to rescue 22 orphans.

“Some people had met at least one of these children. We all kind of built around that,” said Blackburn, who is senior manager of government relations for Aurora Innovation, a self-driving technology company based in the Strip District. “Any war, any conflict, orphans are going to be your most vulnerable members of society.” And, he stressed, the number of orphans has increased as the war drags on.

The playground will be built with ramps and other accommodations for its target group and will be located in a public park in Buchach, a city of 12,000 in the western part of the country. Its city council is providing land for the playground and will be responsible for installation and upkeep of the equipment.

A Ukrainian company will make the equipment and install it, Blackburn said, a side benefit as it helps a company that most likely has not had a call for its services since the war began.

The playground project came to PURC’s attention through Tetiana Borysenko, a Rule of Law fellow studying for her master’s degree in international law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law’s Center for International Legal Education.

A corporate attorney for 19 years, she enrolled at Pitt in August after fleeing Ukraine with her family.

One of her Pittsburgh friends told her about the need for the playground, and PURC had already funded a project in Buchach with its city council. That effort sent 21 youths to a recreation center for children with disabilities, and it had a needed medical service there.

“It was a great project,” Borysenko said. “So we decided that we can go with another one.  A lot of children were relocated from other parts of Ukraine to this part of the country. Lots of them have disabilities, and they don’t have the structure [to help them] there.

“It will be nice to help them so they can feel like themselves and not be discriminated [against].  In Ukraine, the structure for people with disabilities and children is not sufficient. You can say there is no structure.”  

Blackburn said Borysenko proved invaluable to the board. She could read and vet the contracts for the playground’s equipment and installation work. PURC’s board, a collection of a lot of folks with unique experiences and reaches throughout the community, according to Blackburn, carefully reviews the requests and projects to ensure the money awarded reaches the people in most need and through reputable agencies and contacts.  The board meets every Thursday morning to do its work.

PURC began with Dollar Bank, which Blackburn said has been an enormous help, creating a fund to accept donations for Ukrainian orphans. All the money awarded has come from Pittsburgh-area residents who contribute through its website.

“Steve Irwin is really the person who pulled all this together at first. I have known Steve for a long time. He started convening all of us,” Blackburn said. Irwin, a partner in the Leech Tischman Fiscaldo & Lampl law firm, gave PURC structure and performed “tremendous pro bono work for us,” he continued.  

The Pittsburgh region has an abundance of Ukrainian churches and associations, including the Ukrainian Cultural and Humanitarian Institute, an organization that PURC worked with on the art therapy program.

“We learned about the program and found out that Steve Haluszczak [president of UCHI] and others were funding the project,” Blackburn said. “[It was a] Wonderful thing. Another organization has vetted this project. This is a group with a great knowledge of the Ukrainian community. It’s an enormous lead. So many of these children are suffering with enormous issues. In the U.S., we take these types of programs for granted as Americans. They won’t be available in some of these [Ukrainian] communities if we don’t help.”

In addition, PURC has provided funds for heating supplies, clothing, educational programs and field trips. Groups and individuals, such as Father Charron and Sherwood, have brought the needs to the board, which Blackburn said is a help. It has also donated to DT Care, a Moon-based nonprofit organization, which Blackburn called a wonderful organization that also carefully vets its projects.

Blackburn met Charron when he and his wife looked for a church holding in-person services during the pandemic. They found out that Holy Trinity was celebrating a Divine Liturgy in a Carnegie cemetery, and curious, they traveled there to attend it.

“I never had any experience with Ukrainians [before],” Blackburn recalled. “They are just the nicest, kindest people. It was nice that they embraced their ethnicity, but they didn’t shun you if you were from somewhere else. They were so kind and accommodating.”

So Blackburn and his family, who live in Oakmont, make the trip to Carnegie — not a short trip, he says — every Sunday for Mass, and he has become very active in the church. Borysenko, who lives in Edgewood with her son as she finishes her degree, attends Mass there, too, even though it takes her two buses and up to two hours to get there on Sundays. 

Borysenko, who was raised in the Orthodox faith but may become Catholic, said she had seen Blackburn in church but has come to know him through her PURC volunteer work.

How Borysenko ended up at the Pitt Law School’s Center for International Legal Education, an initiative that prepares Ukrainian and Afghanistan legal professionals for careers in global law, is a story in itself. One of the CILE’s first international partnerships was with Donetsk National University Faculty of Law in Eastern Ukraine, and 20 years ago she took advantage of a summer camp program it held there. She said she seized “every opportunity,” including traveling to an international moot court exercise in Vienna. She wanted to come to Pitt for law school and still has a Pitt pen that works from that summer camp, but it was not meant to be. Borysenko finished her education in Ukraine and became a corporate attorney for 19 years, following her attorney father and a grandfather who was a judge as a legal professional.

Borysenko kept in contact with a Pitt staff member, and when the war began last year, she urged Borysenko, now married with three children, to come to the United States with her family. The Borysenkos crossed the Ukrainian border on March 9, and she applied for the fellowship program while in France. Pitt officials helped her obtain the needed student visa. Her husband, Andrii Hladun, and her two daughters ended up in New Jersey through United for Ukraine, a State Department program. “He’s a lawyer, but he doesn’t speak English, so he can’t practice here,” she explained.

They can stay for two years through that initiative, Borysenko said. Her next step, after graduating on May 6, may be to apply for Optional Practical Training, which will permit her to stay here for an additional year and practice law. Or she will apply to the same State Department program that covers the rest of her family.

“Not living with your family for a long time, [it is] difficult,” she said. “I want to stay in Pittsburgh. I fell in love with the city the day I came here.”  

What’s ahead for PURC in the short term is keeping its focus on helping the orphans in any way it can with its partners. Blackburn said Father Charron is making another trip to Ukraine at the end of this month, for example. Board members review past projects, too.

“We get these great updates, photos. It gets very esoteric,” Blackburn said. “You want to see what is really happening. Therapy is a unique and personal experience. … This has been very edifying for all of us.”

He added that the playground project’s side benefit is giving the orphans’ caregivers a break. “I think running an orphanage is a challenge anyway,” Blackburn said. “But an unjust and unfair war, causing many injuries and people perishing, it adds a whole other layer to all of this. The layer of stress these caregivers and children are living with, it’s unfathomable to us.”

And in the long term? Blackburn said PURC will help Ukraine in any way it can once the war concludes to help it and its people rebuild.

“I would hope that the war ends, and the war ends soon, and we start raising money for rebuilding Ukraine,” he said, bringing tears to Borysenko’s eyes. “That is the transition I would like PURC to build toward as Ukraine becomes again a free and independent country. That’s what I would like to do.” 

PURC donations can be submitted via a secure portal on the coalition’s website. Checks made payable to the Pittsburgh Ukrainian Relief Coalition can be mailed to: Pittsburgh Ukrainian Relief Coalition, 525 William Penn Place, 28th floor, Pittsburgh, PA 15219.