HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM US, AND LOOKING BACK ON 2023 /НАШИ ПОЗДРАВЛЕНИЯ И ИТОГИ ГОДА

Dear Friend of our pro-immigrant, pro-democracy network of organizations and initiatives in the post-Soviet diasporas, Our team wishes you and your loved ones happy holidays, filled with joy and warmth, and a truly happy new year. We wish for this year to bring peace, justice, and changes to the better for all of us, especially in Ukraine and in Israel. We are deeply grateful to each of you who has been with us in spirit, contributed your material support, good vibes, and other resources to our work in the course of this year, and is reading this message. Let us mention just a few of our joint achievements in 2023. Our Russian-speaking Community Council – the New York-based immigrant services and advocacy 501(с)3 nonprofit – accomplished, among other things, the following: * Launched our first-ever direct services to the newest asylum seekers from Eurasian countries, in collaboration with the Catholic Charities Community Services of New York and other partners under New York State’s Assistance for Migrants Program; * As a by-product of this work, developed and published, in collaboration with prominent members of the American Immigration Lawyers’ Association (including our Board Member Elena Denevich), the first-ever Handbook for Russian-speaking Refugees and Asylum Seekers on the U.S. Immigration System, to be used for client education by attorneys and for pro se needs; * Continued our advocacy with city and state authorities (including by testifying at the City Council budget hearings) for the needs of our communities – first and foremost Ukrainian refugees from the Kremlin’s aggression, as well as Russian, Belarusian, and other asylum seekers fleeing persecution; * With the help of our Board Member Marina Yanov, produced memorial websitebased on the personal archive of Dr. Alexander Yanov (1930-2022), an influential Russian-American historian, political thinker and commentator who repeatedly warned American audiences in the 1990s about the perils of ‘Weimar Russia’. In the meantime, American Russian-speaking Association for Civil & Human Rights – our US-wide platform for opposing human rights abuses, anti-democratic regimes, and aggression as the root causes of the refugee flow from the region – has worked on national and international issues. In particular, ARA: * Convened five international roundtables (two of them as part of our multi-year Ukrainian and Russian Diasporas Antiwar Dialogue); this year, our speakers included U.S. State Department’s Jacob Levin, Svetlana Gannushkina (head of the Civic Assistance Committee and member of the leadership of the Memorial Society), Evgen Zakharov (head of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group and member of the leadership of the Memorial Society), Gary Kalman (Transparency International U.S. executive director), Alexey Semyonov (Andrei Sakharov Foundation president) and other distinguished individuals; * Presented our Antiwar Dialogue’s position on the war in Ukraine and the civic empowerment of refugees, via Liubov Stasiv’s and Dmitri Glinski’s joint remarks at the United Nations headquarters, delivered as part of the International Day of Democracy forum of the Global Democracy Coalition (GDC); * Continued our engagement around the Summits for Democracy (of which we have been vocal supporters since before the first summit), by taking part in government-level consultations and the GDC forum in Washington; co-organizing a roundtable on countering autocrats’ and oligarchs’ reputation laundering with Transparency International U.S. and Alliance for Vietnam’s Democracy; and contributing our own pledges to the collective GDC members’ pledges to advance, strengthen and protect democracy that were announced as part of the civil society efforts at the Second Summit. We look forward to reconnecting with you around our future events and initiatives in 2024. We will keep you posted about them – please follow the Facebook pages of RCC and ARA and our joint Telegram channel. And we will be happy to hear back from you on your wishes for us and our work in the coming year. Happy holidays! RCC and ARA Boards of Directors and staff