Archive - April 19, 2023

Alum of Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey CA sponsoring a Ukrainian Alum’s Humanitarian Parole   It wasn’t the email Yaroslav Perepadya had been hoping for. Cortney Copeland  MPA/MAIEM ’15 had bad news—the potential American sponsor for him and his teenage son hadn’t checked out. It had been six months since Perepadya MACD ’03 and his son had fled their home in Dnipro, a day after Russia invaded at the border, just 150 miles from their home. They headed first to western Ukraine, then to Ireland, where they’d been hunkering down in a hotel room for months as Perepadya looked for a long-term home in the U.S. Copeland, a board member and volunteer with the Returned Peace Corps Volunteers Alliance for Ukraine (RPCV Alliance), apologized for having gotten his hopes up and said they were still looking to see if they could find a match. As she scanned his bio, a detail jumped . . .