 Welcome to this episode of Million Dollar Gift. Million Dollar Gift is, I'll just remind you, a series that we do here in Arlington that really highlights the fact that this town runs on volunteer energy and that we are, whether we are aware of it or not, we are all benefiting greatly from the time and energy that lots and lots of people in town devote free of charge to the rest of us and with great benefit, as I said. Today I'm going to be talking to Olga Yulikova and she is the founder of Olga's List. We will find out very shortly what that is all about. But I will say that she fits well into this episode because while most of the time we're talking about Arlingtonians directly benefiting from the volunteer energy here, that's not exclusively the case. And in this case it is, we hope, the people of Ukraine who are indeed benefiting from Olga and her efforts as you will soon find out. So, first of all I want to say thanks, really thanks a lot for being here. Thank you so much. I appreciate it, partly because I know you have a full-time job. I do. Right? So that's again, that's the very definition of what we're talking about with this series is that you have made the decision to devote a lot of your free time and energy to this cause. So let's get to talking about it. And before we talk specifically about Olga's List, how it functions, how it came about, et cetera, let me just ask you for a little bit of, you know, biographical information if you don't mind. Where are you from? How did you get to Arlington? That kind of thing. Sure. So I was born in Moscow during Soviet times. My family left in 1989, so I came here to Massachusetts then. Then I went away, lived in different parts of the country, then came back here in 2000 and when my first daughter was born we bought a house in Arlington and we've been there ever since. So you're a good long time resident of Arlington for sure. Absolutely. You and I were... 20 years. Right. When we were speaking before we, you know, turned the cameras on about the fact that your daughters have grown up here in Arlington. They are native Arlingtonians. Absolutely. And so that's a great thing in and of itself. But I'm curious indeed about the fact that you said you're born in Moscow. So that's got to be a question that people are asking all the time, right? They do. How in fact did you get to this place? So basically I'll just ask you, take us in however you want through that sequence of, okay, invasion, like, I don't know, maybe this was all in the works before, you know, one country was invaded by the other. But just tell us in your own words how you got to this place. Sure. So I actually didn't believe that the war would start. So I was very surprised on February 24th when the first bombardment started in the city of Kharkiv where the father of my children was born and raised. And we watched it to our horror on TV. It was dark and we saw the splashing lights of the first bombs falling down and it was just surreal. For the first week I was, I don't even know how to describe it. I guess depressed is the best way and completely desperate to do something about the war. But what do you do? So after a week of just literally lying in bed depressed, I figured that I might as well do something, set up some humanitarian aid going to Ukraine. And that's exactly what I started doing. And it turns out there was a lot of aid needed to people in the territories. And I started collecting items to be sent to Ukraine. The Arlington community came through instantly. I had boxes and boxes of things dropped off at my front porch at 14 Amherst Street and people just bringing all kinds of donations. How did they find out about it? I put the ad on everything free Arlington group through Facebook and stuff to start with. That's all it took, really. It's all took like one ad. So lots of help came, items came that way which were shipped to Ukraine at the beginning of the war. I did a million other things at that time and one thing is leading to another. Again, through Facebook, a refugee who just arrived in Arlington from the city of Zaporizhia, that's been under bombardment, everybody knows that name probably by now. She just moved to Arlington and fleeing the war with her young daughter, middle schooler and like two bags of things, like toothpaste, toothbrush, not much. She said, I'm here, I'm new, I don't know what to do, what my life is going to be like. She had a wonderful host family where she stayed and so the host family and myself were got involved helping her set up with refugee resettlement programs. It was exactly a year ago in June of 2022. By January, she got her own apartment. She was a lot more self-sufficient and once again, I needed stuff to help her with her new apartment. So I put the ad on the same list and within hours, item furniture, household goods, money that's coming in, I had over 850 people who brought in stuff or money. 850 people. All our Lentonians, 854 I think. People brought things to my front porch. As you can imagine, there was a lot of stuff. Careful what you wish for. Exactly, it was overwhelming. I was like, wow, this is crazy, this is one family I'm helping. Boston Globe suddenly called me to write an article about my volunteer work in Arlington and that really made me think, now everyone will call me. So I had to start August list out of necessity, not because I was planning to do that, not because I was thinking about doing this, but because there was nothing else to do. People would call asking for help or offering help and what am I going to do. Right, what a wonderful reason to have to get to this place of kind of systematizing, in a sense, the aid that you are going to be providing. And all because of the just outlandish response there to a couple of posts. Yeah, that is incredibly inspiring story about our town's generosity, but also I think about the cord that has been hit and resonates in this population as in so many parts of the world as people respond to the plight and the reaction of the Ukrainian people to all this. But let's go back a little bit. So you originally, so August list didn't even exist and you had already put out a couple of calls and gotten tremendous responses. Correct. The first time you got mostly goods, is that right? Yeah, household goods, furniture. How did you know, was it like when you put that first thing out, was it just like, hey, if you have anything that could be helpful to people in Ukraine or did you ask for specific things? I did ask for specific things, yeah. So we had a list that was generated by groups back in Ukraine asking for certain items. In the winter, for example, it was all about blankets and thermos and things of that nature to keep people warm. There were other items that they needed, ASAP, like medical emergency supplies, basic medication like Tylenol. So that was the original introduction to helping folks in Ukraine. And that was for Ukrainians. There were no Ukrainians at that time coming into Massachusetts or New England area. Yeah, it was the early days. People started trickling in very, very slowly in the spring of last year, just one or two families. And just to give you an idea, so on January 22nd of 2023, I helped one family and one state and one town, right? Today, today, I have 15. So today we're talking about four months later. Four months later. That's right. We have, on our list, 57 families. That is unbelievable. We have helped people in three states, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and primarily Massachusetts. Yeah. We've had about 20, 21 towns in Massachusetts alone that we covered. People have scattered all over the place. Right. We have multi-generational families with grandparents, parents, young children. We've had two special needs children here, actually, coincidentally, both are in Cambridge-Somerville area. We've had people with severe PTSD from what they've been through. Because people come from really tragic places. Everybody knows Mariupol. So they come from there, you know, what they've been through is unspeakable. And it's not easy a lot of times to talk to people because of what they've been through. Absolutely. But that's okay. My team of volunteers is phenomenal, absolutely phenomenal. And they all just gather around the people and help with constantly in touch. Everything happens through my cell phone. Our entire operation is cell phone based. It's astonishing, right? What can be done with that computer in our pocket? That's right. Super computer in our pocket. Everything is done through the cell phone. I have to ask you all that. This is, you know, I didn't know a lot of this story before we started talking, I have to say. And I'm dumbfounded in a lot of ways by what you just said. Of course, tremendously dramatic example of the success in the court, as I said before, that has resonated here four months time. And you move from one family to 57 in three different states, probably 57 different towns. Because I imagine, you know, more or less, logistically, that just blows my mind, right? How have you, like, and you've been the main manager of all this, right? Right. You and your phone. Yeah. Me and my phone. Right. You and Siri together. But like, is this the kind of work that you do in your full-time job? Is this the kind of work that you've done before? Have you had practice in some way of just handling the logistics for a response like this, both on the donor side, but also on the recipient side, right? You must have been finding out at the rate of two to four to six families a week coming into this, right? Sometimes a day. A day. How on earth did you stay on top of that? Or have you stayed on top of that? Let's see. How do I do it? So, I've had a little bit of similar experience, never of that intensity or scale or tragic reason for that. So, I've been a volunteer manager in multiple jobs. So, I know how to recruit and retain volunteers, which is very important. Very important. Very important. I'm good at matching volunteers with the task that they think they want to do and what the need of the people we're serving. I almost never say no to anyone. So, that's like a good and a bad thing. Yeah. So, when I say yes, I deliver. So, I stick to what I say. So, that's that. On the physical aspect of it, how it happens, there's so many different social media tools available today that it's the easiest thing to set up. That's the easiest part? Yeah. Everything is done through a couple apps on the phone. We use a lot of things that European people use. WhatsApp, Telegram and Facebook. Those are the three main platforms that we're using. And that's about it. That's how all communication goes through those platforms. So, we can instantaneously reach our clients, reach our participants, reach our volunteers, everybody. All the stakeholders are pretty tech savvy. So, well, with a few exceptions, of course. So, that, logistically, it's been the easiest thing. What's not easy is once we bring people in, connecting them with appropriate services, we have no money. No money to give. We want to give money. That's been our original idea that when people get and ask for help from us, we'll just give them money. Well, it turns out, handing out money, it doesn't work, basically, for all kinds of logistical reasons. Right, and even legal reasons, I would say. Legal, logistical, it becomes a, it's just a problem. So, we cannot do that. So, we don't do that. So, what we decided that we'll do, that we will be raising funds that would go directly to our program participants, to our clients, our families. But this funding will be done in a strategic way, such as when people come in and they need to pay for certain items for the household. Once again, basic stuff. Tylenol. The child is sick in the middle of the night. You have to run out to get Tylenol. You have no money to do that. So, we give them gift certificates to pharmacies or stop and shop for their basic necessities. We also providing money for, to help them move from point A to point B, like moving expenses. We give them money, right now is a big crunch for summer camps for children. So, this morning somebody asked me to donate, to be able to donate to one of the families to pay for their summer camp. I said, yeah, absolutely. We accept donations for summer camp. We accept donations for bare necessities for people. And you can see on the bottom of the screen, you can see the QR code that will take you right to our website. And you can donate through our website, which is very, very easy. Just in case, if you decide to stop by the Arlington TV station abroad, a little QR code for you. So, please keep them. There they are. Keep them. We will be displaying these proudly and conspicuously around the studio. Please do. And you'll see those things around town too. I put them on, I will be putting them on little community gardens. And they're definitely at my house at 14 Amherst Street. So, we are soliciting donations that will go directly to serve the families. We have absolutely no overhead. We have absolutely no bureaucracy. So, it's very quick. And we work within hours of when the family appears on our screen, they fill out a very basic form. Somebody does the intake. One of the intake volunteers calls them. All volunteers are trilingual. They speak English, Russian and Ukrainian. They immediately screen the family in, find out about what's needed ASAP. If it's a food emergency, I put the food in my car and I drive them to the location. Our volunteers drive them to the location. If it's something else, we deal accordingly, basically. So, it's an entire volunteer operations. And we have currently, so in the database per se, we have over 30 volunteers willing to jump in and do stuff. People come every day asking, what else can I do? Really? Every day. But we can always use more people. So, if anybody else wants to join us, there is room. Does anybody who does want to join, what's the process? Just use the QR code on the bottom of the screen. It will take you to the website. And the website has all the three buttons. I need help. I offer help. I'll donate. That's it. Wow. Yeah. You have definitely figured this thing out while the train is moving. Pretty much. You've somehow been able to do that. I have to go back to something that you were saying a little bit earlier, which is that you will put the stuff in your car and get it over to the family. You have a full-time job, as we mentioned before. Yes. I understand that your two daughters will soon both be out of the house. One of them is already in college, but one of them is graduating shortly. Very shortly, actually. So, maybe your child care obligations don't take as much time as they used to or something like that. But still, how on earth do you not sleep? How many hours a day are you spending on Olga's list stuff? It's pretty simple. I work 16 hours a day. I work eight hours at my job and then I take a nap or a workout, take my dog for a walk. That's really important. And then I switch gears and I work for Olga's list until about 12 or one o'clock in the morning. Wow. Last series of emails last night went out around one o'clock in the morning. And you seem bright and cheery today, I have to say. You're doing a great job. Are you holding up well? Are you going to be able to do this indefinitely? Because it sounds like if you're talking about one to 57, I bet you're not done. We're not done. Right? And I bet that it's just going to, I mean, that hopefully won't continue at that pace because that seems, you know, insane. But as you say, you don't say no to people. I don't say no. So, how is this sustainable going forward? I have a great team. So, the only way to do an endeavor like that is rely on your team. Yes. I mean, I've had nightmares. Especially at the beginning, I couldn't sleep well because I would wake up in the middle of the night thinking, oh, that's family. Did I get them this, whatever it was, or like this family and all that kind of stuff. Right. So many leftover details that can keep you up, right? Exactly. So, I don't do that anymore because I have a phenomenal team of volunteers who know what they're doing. People have been trained at this point quite a bit. And they just, they come to rescue. I couldn't do it without them. So, I don't know off the top of my head how many Arlington based volunteers I have, but a lot. A lot of people from Arlington are helping me. And let's see. So, that's the important thing. And then I think who knows what will happen with this war. But I am hoping that at some point it will end. And so we will not be needed. But then something else will happen in the world. So, I'm open to continue running the organization as long as we're needed. And again, it's not easy, but it's very inspiring. And that's, I think, I hope that the inspiration and the good stories that were here will be enough of the sustainability. And about my children, what I want to say also is that they volunteer with me. Yeah. They're also running around helping. Oh, I have no doubt. I have no doubt. Yeah. Those apples are not falling far. Nope. They're running around with me. Yeah. The, I want to just clarify something because as you said, you're extremely dependent on your group of volunteers. And of course you are. And you mentioned, you know, around 30 or so. And you mentioned that they're all trilingual or at least the intake. Do you mean just the intake volunteers? Basically the case managers? Right. Okay. Good. That's what I want to clarify. Yeah, of course. You don't want to make sure that if people want to volunteer or you don't speak Russian or Ukrainian, there's still things they can do. Oh, the majority of people do not speak Russian or Ukrainian. We have, for example, we have four teachers of English as a second language that teach our clients online, sorry, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. We have classes in the evening. This is how we work. Once we learn that there's no room in any ESL class in Massachusetts, okay, we'll create our own. This is what we did. So volunteers came in. We have one Arlingtonian volunteer. He's wonderful. Then we have somebody from New Hampshire and two family husband and wife who run out of their house in Brooklyn. So they divvied up their responsibility. I'm only CC'd on what they're doing. They run with that. All I need to do is like, wow, cool. Well, again, I don't, I mean, you make it sound much easier and much more organic and much more kind of, okay, one thing flows to the next, flows to the next. Then it must be because this is really a fairly astonishing thing that you have already accomplished. And you're just, we don't know how far into it you are, as you've said. And the fact that you... Nobody has the crystal bowl. Right. And that's just about this war because it's no news to you or to me or to anybody out there that of course there will be a need for an organization such as this. In this world, it may not be Ukraine. It may be somewhere else, but it will be somewhere and something. So it sounds like you're up for the challenge, you know, moving forward from here. We're well positioned. We've got the system working. We're improving the system constantly. In fact, this week, my today, tonight, we're having our leadership meeting in Arlington, of course. And we will be deciding on some of the organizational infrastructure that will make things even easier. And we rely on technology for a lot of kind of moving parts and coordination. And that's supposed to make everything work very smoothly. So I'm not intimidated by the number of families coming in. I'm not intimidated by the number of volunteers at all. So I think it's a great, honestly, it's a great opportunity for the volunteers too. And people, what I've heard from people say to me, the volunteers is, I didn't know what to do to help. You give me the opportunity to help. Thank you. So I get thank yous for volunteers to letting them do what they do. Well, it takes you right back to yourself, right? In that first week after the invasion, as you said. And you were just like in shock, right? You're just like, I cannot believe this is happening. And what can I do? And I can't see what I can do. And you know, somehow, you know, folks who are still feeling that way and haven't found something, there's Olga's list. And I can imagine that they would be somewhat grateful for that as a way, again, of taking this stuff that's roiling inside of you and actually having an outlet for it. And what you need to do is devote your energy and some time and some generosity to that. That sounds pretty good. So if people, if our listeners and viewers are interested in joining Olga's list, all you need to do is click on that QR code and it will take you right to our website, sign up. So in addition to the QR code, which I think people, hopefully you've gotten the message now folks, but what is the website itself? It's very simple. It's augustlist.org. There you go. That's it. One word, augustlist.org. Excellent. I'm going to ask you just right at the end here, again, tremendous thing that you're doing and best of luck to you moving forward and I hope that people will respond, as Arlingtonians already have, that they will continue to do so. But I have to ask you, just like I have a couple of close Russian friends who, the reaction that you described initially was I happened to be with them in that same period of time. And they were, they just were, I don't even have words to describe it, they had no, they lost their energy. They just, they didn't understand how to feel as Russians about this. Can you just speak very briefly, you know, out of that situation? I don't know. Okay. Part of me is dead forever. But this work will make it better. Okay. Well, thank you. Thank you for that. And thank you for this. Thank you for augustlist. And thanks for the visit. Thank you so much for this opportunity. Yeah, this is an extraordinary woman, folks, in doing something extraordinary right here in Arlington. That's what this series is all about. And I always feel lucky when I get to talk to people like Olga. So, with our thanks to our guest, Olga, excuse me, Yulikova, and her effort for Olga's list. I am James Milan. This is Million Dollar Gift. We really appreciate your time and yours as well. We'll see you next time.