Ukrainian evacuees are finding shelter in Minnesota. Here’s how St. Paulites are helping.

Mary Divine, Pioneer Press
Updated ·11 min read
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It didn’t take long for the Malynovskyi family to feel at home at their new apartment in St. Paul.

Within minutes of arriving on Thursday morning, Oleksandr Malynovskyi and Olena Malynovska were unpacking groceries in the kitchen while their children played with a toy piano, a yellow knobby ball and a Tupperware Shape-O ball toy at a child-size table in the living room. After exploring the rest of the garden-level apartment near Selby and Western avenues, Emiliia, 2½, came back to the living room with a green laundry hamper and hopped in.

Toys, it turns out, are universal.

“She’s happy to be here,” said Oleksandr “Sasha” Malynovskyi as he placed a Home Depot cardboard moving box on the kitchen table.

The Malynovskyi family left their home in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Dec. 1, traveled by train to Poland and Amsterdam, and arrived at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport on Dec. 6. They picked Minnesota after being matched with Woodbury resident Steve Campbell through the national Welcome.US refugee program.

“It was a hard decision,” Sasha Malynovskyi said Thursday, speaking in his native Ukrainian through interpreter Ana Nikolaieva. “But we were concerned about our safety. We were living in a tall building, and we didn’t have electricity, heat or water. Every day it became harder to live in such conditions. When we connected with Steve, we decided, ‘It’s time to go.’”

‘Uniting for Ukraine’

Almost 8 million Ukrainians have fled the country or been displaced since Russia invaded in February 2022, according to the United Nations.

Many of those people have found shelter in Europe, especially Poland, but more than 100,000 have come to the United States under “Uniting for Ukraine,” a federal government initiative launched in April 2022. The program allows Ukrainians who have been displaced by the war to seek refuge in the U.S. if they have a private sponsor willing to house and financially support them for two years.

More than 2,300 sponsors — individuals and groups — have stepped up to support Ukrainians trying to build a new life in Minnesota, according to the Minnesota Department of Human Services.

Hennepin County has led the way with 780 approved sponsor applications as of Dec. 13, according to state officials, and Anoka County is next with 327.

Under the process, the Malynovskyi family and other Ukrainians are granted humanitarian parole, which lasts for two years and creates a pathway to work authorization.

Sasha Malynovskyi owned a technology company in Kyiv, specializing in search-engine optimization, and had 10 employees.

“After the war started, he had just one client, and he had really no job,” Nikolaieva said. “He was obliged to close the firm and lay all the people off.”

The Malynovskyi family considered settling in Florida or New York — both states with large Ukrainian communities — but decided on Minnesota after matching with Campbell.

“They learned about the climate and learned that the Ukrainian community is really strong here, and then they decided that Minnesota is OK for them,” Nikolaieva said. “There are also a lot of job opportunities in Minnesota.”

Sasha Malynovskyi, 33, is enrolled in an in-person English class at the International Institute of Minnesota in St. Paul; Olena Malynovska, 33, is taking an online English course through the institute.

Sasha Malynovskyi said he plans to look for a job that doesn’t require much English at first.

“I need to know more language,” he said through Nikolaieva. “I’m working on it, but I think that I need to start with something simple like being a truck driver or something.”

Son Nikita, 7, is enrolled at Global Arts Plus Elementary School in St. Paul and is already speaking some words in English, Sasha Malynovskyi said. Nikita likes playing basketball and riding four-wheeled scooters, he said.

One of the first items Nikita brought to the new apartment was a large orange sled.

Barb Freeman, a volunteer who helped furnish the apartment, helped him find a place to store it outside the back door.

Day-to-day support

The apartment is a new temporary “landing pad” for Ukrainians arriving in St. Paul. It’s owned by St. Paul resident Jeffrey Austin, who has volunteered with Alight, formerly the American Refugee Committee.

It’s a godsend for sponsors and families like the Malynovskyi family, who previously were staying at an Airbnb near Concordia College in St. Paul that cost $3,300 a month.

Campbell, 34, said he and his wife, Hannah, were moved to help after spotting an Alight newspaper ad seeking sponsors. “I had been following the war pretty closely since February and felt like this was finally something I could do at an individual level to provide support,” he said.

The Campbells teamed up with family members, friends and co-workers to raise $10,500 to sponsor the Malynovskyi family. Campbell, a toxicologist at 3M Co., and some of the group met the family at the airport when they arrived. “They came with just their suitcases and a couple of backpacks,” he said.

The sponsors provide day-to-day support to make sure the family has everything they need to start a new life in the U.S. — from navigating the Metro Transit system to helping them buy a 2009 Toyota Prius to getting the children enrolled in school.

They’re now searching for a suitable apartment in St. Paul for the family to move into in February.

Austin’s donated apartment “gives us some breathing room as we look for a longer-term place for them to stay,” Campbell said. “It also gives us some overlap and gives us time to find furniture and everything they would need for the other apartment.”

Alight officials hope other landlords might follow Austin’s lead, said Steph Koehne, sponsor program lead for Alight, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit that offers resources and guidance for the local sponsors.

“It’s been so helpful because it alleviates the need for funding from the fundraising group to go towards a temporary stay,” she said. “Although (Austin) isn’t directly sponsoring a family, he is still a part of the process. That’s been my favorite part of this sponsor program: We’ve started to see more and more people step forward in unique ways to be supportive.”

A local therapist, for example, volunteered to reach out to fellow therapists to see if anyone would donate mental-health services to the newly arriving Ukrainians, Koehne said.

“We’ve made these really great connections with community members who have unique ways to give,” she said. “I have had people email or call and say, ‘I’m an employer, and I would really love to employ someone who is coming from Ukraine. These are the job openings I have.’ A lot of people have stories about their own arrival in the United States or their parents’ arrival in the United States that really inspires them to be part of this process in welcoming people to Minnesota.”

Alight was founded in 1978 to support people at the Thai-Cambodian border. The humanitarian organization provides health care, clean water, shelter, protection and economic opportunities to more than 3.5 million people in more than 20 countries each year, Koehne said.

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Alight started working in the United States last spring with Afghan refugees. That work led Welcome.US to reach out to the organization to see if they would help find sponsors for Ukrainian families, she said.

“We were seen as making Minnesota a really welcoming space by creating programming for the Afghans,” she said. “They came to us and said, ‘Can you help recruit people in Minnesota to support the Ukrainians?’”

Expanding its mission to help find sponsor groups in Minnesota — they hope to find 100 in all — has been an exciting change for Alight, according to Koehne.

“Five years ago, if someone called and said, ‘I want to help out. I’m in Minnesota. You’re located in Minnesota,’ we had to say, ‘We don’t do things in Minnesota; we do things globally.’ Now, we get multiple calls and emails a day, ‘I live in Minnesota, and I want to help,’ and we have an answer for that. We have something that they can do — something that they can do with their unique community, their unique skill sets and their open hearts to give.”

‘How could I not do more?’

Austin, the landlord who is donating the apartment, worked as an international documentary photographer for 10 years, aiding humanitarian organizations such as the Red Cross, the American Refugee Committee and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. After traveling with a friend to the Ukraine-Poland border in May to volunteer in a refugee center for two weeks, Austin reached out to Alight to ask how he could help.

“It’s something that has been rattling around in my brain for a while: ‘How can I / we do more?’ Like most of us, I would send a few bucks here and there and support different causes, but I felt that with what is going on now in Europe, and Ukraine specifically, that it all feels like a larger magnitude,” said Austin, a partner in Stonewood Investments. “How could I not do more? I am fortunate enough. I’ve had a reasonably successful business life. You know what? We need to step up, and this is our time.”

Austin, who grew up in Roseville, reached out to friends and sent a letter to all of the residents of the building at 151 N. Western Ave. “Everyone wanted to be part of the welcoming committee,” he said.

‘We just want to embrace them’

Freeman, of Eden Prairie, volunteered to help furnish and decorate the apartment. She worked with another woman, a retired interior designer, to find dressers, chairs, a couch, lamps and artwork.

The two shopped thrift stores in the south metro on a Wednesday in November to take advantage of the senior discount. “We went through the whole day and kept finding these things,” she said. “We found floor lamps at one store, a table with a mosaic on it at another. We found a dresser that fits perfectly in this bedroom. We had very specific requirements for the couch because the doors to the apartment are only 27 inches wide. We found one that fit at our very last stop of the day, and it was within our budget.”

The man who helped take the dresser out to Freeman’s truck expressed concern that it might not fit in the truck bed, which was already full with a boot bench, TV stand and other items.

“I said, ‘Of course it’s going to fit! Everything is working out today,’” she said. “It just slid right in there. There was a half-inch on either side. That was the story, over and over again, the whole day.”

Freeman opened a private Target registry — Ukrainian Welcome Apartment — so friends who wanted to help could purchase items such as towels, sheets and pillows. A woman in her book club donated a bed; another friend bought a Shark vacuum cleaner. The trundle bed in the children’s bedroom came from her mother’s basement, she said.

“We just trusted that everything would come together,” she said. “We’re here to love our neighbors as ourselves. It’s just such a joy. I think that God is abundant, and what we have, we share. Right now, what I have is time and talent, and so I’m sharing.”

Freeman is especially proud of the artwork that graces the apartment, including a large painting at the front entry that features the word “Welcome” in English and Ukrainian.

“We intentionally didn’t say ‘Welcome Home’ because their home is in Ukraine,” she said. “We just want to embrace them and let them know that people care. I can’t imagine what they’re going through. I can’t even fathom. … I hope that they can feel safe and warm here.”

Freeman shopped the Black Friday sales at Best Buy for the 32-inch TV and an Echo Dot. “Music is something I wanted to have for them,” she said. “The (Dot) gives them access to everything.”

A friend donated a quilt made out of blue and yellow fabric — the colors of the Ukrainian flag — for the main bedroom. Another friend donated white dishes “but he just happened to have these yellow and blue ones, too,” she said.

A bookcase that “a friend of a friend” had in her garage fit perfectly in the apartment’s alcove, she said.

“There have been so many serendipitous things like that,” Freeman said. “I just have to believe that God’s hand is involved.”

She said she hopes the Malynovskyis and the other Ukrainian families who will live in the apartment over the next year will feel at home.

“One of the women described it as a lily pad, a jumping-off point, and I loved that,” she said. “We’re the nice aunties and uncles who do the extra things — a little bit, but not all of it. People are just thrilled to be part of this amazing effort. It’s a tiny little hug to the people of Ukraine.”

HOW TO HELP

Alight is looking for sponsors interested in helping families from Ukraine. For more information, go to https://wearealight.org/be-a-welcomer-sponsor-a-ukrainian-family.

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