Educating Eastern Europe’s Future Leaders

April 5, 2022

On behalf of Marty Milne, President of ASSIST and the ASSIST Board of Directors

As the world watches Ukrainians’ fierce defense of their freedom and East Europeans’ selfless help with the humanitarian crisis on their borders, it reminds us of ASSIST’s important legacy of contributing to international solidarity, civic engagement and campaign for democratic values on display throughout the region.

Over the course of 53 years, over 5,800 international Scholars have come to the U.S. through ASSIST to immerse themselves in American values, as they engage in free debate, celebrate diversity, openly sharing one’s beliefs and contributing to the community. Our Scholars are proud ambassadors of their cultures, but they also take back those values and further them in their home countries. We believe that connecting young people from around the world who have a shared passion and vision and a commitment to cross-cultural understanding will foster a more peaceful world.

Less than a year after the fall of the Iron Curtain, ASSIST brought its first East European Scholar to the U.S. Since then, over one thousand high school age students from Eastern Europe, including 313 of them from the former Soviet Union, have had life-changing experiences at U.S. independent schools. One, Andrii Magaletskyi from Ukraine, attended Stony Brook School in New York last school year. Stony Brook School expects graduates to “serve the world through what they have learned.” While there, Andy played soccer, studied U.S. History and explored 3D Modeling. His career goal is to become the Elon Musk of Ukraine.

Andy, now 17, has recently fled from Kyiv to Poland with his pregnant mother, father, and three younger brothers. His eldest brother and grandparents remain in Ukraine.

“The U.S. is a good country for people who want to do something, who have ideas and who want to make the world good,” he said by phone from Kyiv the day before his departure. On two previous mornings his neighborhood had been shelled by the Russian military. Now, Andy is reaching out to U.S. friends, detailing life in bomb shelters, and “on the edge of death,” as he describes it, and raising funds for Ukraine. His new life goal, he said in an email, is to “empower and develop his country after the war.”

ASSIST alumni from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have returned home to provide leadership in their countries and act as agents of positive change in the world. As a student at Montclair Kimberly Academy in New Jersey, Arnoldas Pranckevičius from Lithuania starred in the school play. With his American host family, he saw Wagner’s Faust at the Lincoln Center and met the editor of the New York Times. Now Arnoldas, whose grandmother perished in Siberia, serves as Lithuania’s Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Lithuania to the European Union.

Martins Zemitis, who hails from Latvia, spent a year at the Fountain Valley School in Colorado Springs and is now the Deputy Head of the European Commission’s Representation in Riga.

Elena Terzi, from Moldova, studied at the Orme School, a tiny school in the Arizona desert where rodeo is a school sport, now works with People in Need, one of the biggest non-profit organizations in Central Europe.

Klaudia Klonowska, a former ASSIST scholar from Poland at Chatham Hall in Virginia, is a Ph.D. Candidate in International Law at the TMC Asser Instituut in The Hague and the University of Amsterdam. She currently works on artificial intelligence in military decision making.

A more recent alumna, Barbora Kvasničková from the Czech Republic, studied at Tower Hill School in Wilmington, DE and became her country’s Youth Delegate to the United Nations within two years of her return.

All five of these extraordinary alumni are fulfilling ASSIST’s mission to educate future leaders committed to promoting international understanding, civic values and tolerance across cultures, racial designations and religious beliefs.

As the former Soviet Republics built democracies in the 1990s, ASSIST played a role in bringing young people from these countries to the U.S. to learn about democratic values so that they could return as the next generation of leaders in their home nations. ASSIST will continue to help instill these values in young Eastern Europeans, and we stand by the people of Ukraine in their heroic fight for freedom and continued independence. While this conflict endures and after it has ended, ASSIST will remain committed to bringing Scholars from Eastern Europe to American independent schools, preparing them to join alumni like Andrii in reestablishing peace in Eastern Europe.