Support for Ukraine from Carlisle | Wortman Associates
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is global news, but, to some of us, it is personal.
In 1995, I worked in the Kyiv office of a democracy development organization. Zach Michels’s wife was born in Russia and has relatives in both Russia and Ukraine. I visited a tea shop in downtown Ann Arbor on a lunchtime walk this week and learned that the owner’s cousins in western Ukraine were fleeing to Poland. I suspect that there are dozens of similar stories in each of our client communities. Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odessa, Lviv are more than names on a map. They are places where we have been or where people we care for live.
The conflict also hits us at Carlisle|Wortman because it is about the survival of a democracy. We provide services to municipal governments, who, at every public meeting, demonstrate the living building blocks of a functioning democracy: transparency, accountability, and rule of law. Elected and appointed officials make decisions in front of their communities, with documentation and discussion in plain sight. They use local ordinances, state and federal laws to make decisions, often when it would be convenient or expedient not to. Throughout our decades of service to client communities, we have witnessed how the public holds those officials accountable - through public comment at meetings, letters, e-mails, exchanges on social media, and at the polls.
Transparency, accountability, and rule of law is at the heart of our business, advising elected and appointed officials how to honor those principles in every decision, big and small.
We stand with our client communities. We stand with democracy. We stand with Ukraine.
- Megan Masson-Minock