Den’s Initiatives Support Charitable Foundation held its Odesa presentation at the press center of the travel agency Aquavita’s local branch, located in a historic building on Pushkin Street. A member of the foundation, Aquavita Ltd.’s CEO, Ukrainian patriot and patron of culture Tetiana Yurkova was the event’s chief organizer. The evening’s guests included the foundation’s president, poet and journalist Mykola Hrytsenko, Odesa businesspeople such as CEO of Interbroker company and Ukrainian culture patron Vitalii Oplachko, president of the European Association of Business Women Ilona Zgurova, president of the Odesa Association of Tour Operators and Travel Agencies Oleksandr Hrabovsky, Aquavita Ltd.’s Odesa branch manager Iryna Hontarenko, as well as a historian and ethnographer, director of the Odesa Regional Archives Ivan Nitochko; prominent local painter, Honored Artist of Ukraine, member of the Mamai Creative Association Serhii Savchenko; Honored Journalist of Ukraine Mykhailo Aksaniuk; professor at Odesa National Medical University Ihor Hladchuk; and a lecturer in journalism at Odesa Mechnikov National University Svitlana Bondar. We are pleased to inform our readers that some of the just listed guests have also been Den’s contributors. Odesa libraries, student community and other groups were represented, too. Some patrons were unable to visit the event, despite making a surprisingly large contribution to Den’s promotion in Odesa. For instance, CEO of Doehle Manning Agency Odessa Ukraine Ltd. bought Den’s publications for 4,000 hryvnias to be presented to the initiative’s participants and Odesa libraries. CEO of Impala Travel company Maryna Kocherzhenko and Marfin Bank’s Odesa branch manager Liudmyla Kunytska paid for the city’s mercy homes’ Den’s subscriptions, while Zgurova, Oplachko, and Hontarenko covered Den’s subscription costs for Odesa libraries and orphanages. Bondar aptly expressed her understanding of the newspaper’s mission, quoting Scripps, an American media mogul who held that the true mission of the press is “to reassure the worried and disturb the complacent.” In her opinion, the latter part of Scripps’s statement is most relevant in our current situation, and its underlying idea can be equally well expressed with a Ukrainian proverb: “my house is at the edge, making me the first to meet any enemy” (an antithesis to the more traditional form of the proverb, where “my house is at the edge” stands for the English “none of my business”). Bondar lists “101 Reasons to Love Ukraine” among the projects that are making most to wake up patriotic pride in the Ukrainians. Thus, we hope that this initiative, a manifestation of the civil society development process ongoing in Odesa and throughout Ukraine, will contribute to revival of interest in Den among the Odesites, and most importantly, strengthen the newspaper worldview’s influence among the city’s residents.
