A group enterprise, from the beginning.

The Ukraine-USA Pen Pal Program was featured in a broadcast segment on WJLA 7News in March 2026. The program has published an essay collection, The Pen Pal is Mightier Than the Sword: Friendship Underneath the Drones, written primarily by Ukrainian student participants and teachers. President and Mrs. Zelensky were each personally handed a copy of it.

Students in the 2026 collection come from Odessa, Okhtyrka, Mykolaiv, Horodnia, Sokal, Chernihiv, Lviv, Lutsk, Kharkiv, Nebyliv, Dnipro, and Kyiv.

From the beginning, this program has been a group enterprise.

CHRIS MEAD – FOUNDER

Freedom

The final essay in the 2026 collection is by an essential advisor to the program from its very early stages: Professor Vasyl Taras, Dean of the School of Management of the Bryan School of Business at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Prof. Taras sees the pen pal program as not only providing English assistance to Ukrainian students, but also giving them an alternative cultural orientation: a taste of the “openness, initiative, collaboration, and global engagement” of the West, and leaving behind some of the old-fashioned authoritarianism and occasional xenophobia of the “Russian Mir” (the cultural and social sphere of Russia and some of its neighbors).

In short, the pen pal program provides a taste of freedom.