Over the years, many students have cited TFAS programs as a stepping stone to their careers. 25 year old Andriy Maksymovych (AIPES 07) not only credits TFAS with helping him to get his career off the ground, but also says that his time in AIPES taught him the importance of giving back to his community and reinforced his commitment to public service.

Maksymovych’s most recent public service project was planning the Race for Children: National Charitable Marathon in his native Ukraine.

While attending the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv in Ukraine, Maksymovych studied abroad his senior year at Eastern Connecticut State University on an IREX/U.S. Department of State Scholarship. There he met Raymond Aramini, the organizer of the Bike for Bread across America.

After speaking with Aramini, Maksymovych was inspired to organize the first Race for Children. He returned home to Ukraine after a year at Eastern Connecticut but continued to develop the idea and worked with 60 other college-aged students to make the Race for Children a reality. Among these 60 colleagues were three TFAS alumni – Maryna Yaroshchuk (AIPES 07), Mykhaylo Zakryzhevskyy (AIPES 08) and Alla Myshalova (AIPES 07).

The group interviewed local hospitals in order to find out which areas needed the most help, and decided to focus on raising money for prematurely born babies in Ukraine.

Additionally, the Race for Children was also aimed to encourage people to take action rather than to wait for the government’s actions. “In this way,” said Maksymovych, “We were promoting social and corporate responsibility in our society.”

After eight months of planning, recruiting volunteers, and securing sponsors, Maksymovych and a friend jogged nearly 900 miles from eastern Ukraine to the western border, making it the first nation-wide charitable marathon in Ukraine.

In the end, the race raised over $50,000 and helped to install brand new equipment in four Lviv maternity hospitals. The Race for Children campaign will continue as an ongoing fundraising initiative to benefit maternity hospitals in different areas of Ukraine.

“This was a significant sum for a country like Ukraine in which businesses have had hardly any incentives to donate in the past,” said Maksymovych. “The project turned out to be a good example of a successful public-private partnership,” he concluded.

Maksymovych was recognized by Ukraine’s Cabinet of Ministers with the Award for Particular Achievements of Youth in the Development of Ukraine, and the project was included in a collection of National Best Practices of Youth Policy issued by the Kharkiv regional government and local NGOs.

Aside from his accomplishments with the Race for Children, Maksymovych won the Erasmus Mundus Scholarship of the European Commission and was able to study for one year in Europe. During this scholarship, he attended the Erasmus University Rotterdam, Ghent University and the University of Bologna while completing an MA/LLM in law and economics. While at the University of Bologna, he worked on his master’s thesis on the impact of the corporate governance regime on the inflow of the foreign direct investment in the post-communist countries.

Maksymovych has also been involved with the Young Diplomacy Center, serves on the Board of Trustees of the Institute of Ukrainian Studies NGO, which he also co-founded in 2005, has worked at the Ukrainian Center for Foreign Investment Promotion and has interned at the Inter-parliamentary Affairs Department of the Parliament of Ukraine and the Economic Department of the Secretariat of the President of Ukraine.

Most recently, Maksymovych was a Fellow with the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly International Secretariat, where he worked on economic aspects of security

“AIPES reconfirmed my interest in economics, international affairs and reinforced my commitment to public service,” said Maksymovych. “I am grateful to TFAS for the inspiration and encouragement that it gives to the participants of its programs. The TFAS world offers many amazing opportunities, which extend beyond their length of the Fund’s programs.”