I am in my twenty-first year in Chicago after being involved for over thirty years in Sion school in Kansas City. I have a tutor mentor program for low income minority grade school children across the street from a housing project of 15,000 poor African American people.  It interested me because of a ghetto situation very near the largest concentration of young adults with university  degrees, mainly white, who worked in the heart of Chicago. The best way to get the two groups involved was to have the well educated adults tutor the disadvantaged children. Later through two tutors a high school program with scholarships for students to get into better schools has been developed and later  these graduates are able to go to four year Universities. Today the children are Latino as well as African American. The programs are independent and raise their own finances. This is a photo of a tutor with some of the children. www.highsight.org

I also work one day a week at the Ukrainian Catholic Education Foundation for  the last several years, at the invitation of a tutor to help raise money for the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, Ukraine. It was founded after communism, the only one in the former Soviet Union countries.  They began with nothing about 1994 and today with help from abroad, like the Chicago office, there is a large building program underway. Yet there are many difficulties stemming from Russia’s constant hold on Ukraine.  In 2003, I taught conversational English  at the University summer program in Ukraine. I am pictured here with the new  young Patriarch Sviatoslay Shevchuk of the Ukrainian Catholic Church worldwide who visited USA to receive an honorary doctorate from Fordham University in New York on  November 20, 2011.  www.ucef.org

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Sr. Stephanie Schmidts nds

Chicago USA