Ukraine will be rebuilt once. We work to make sure it is rebuilt to a standard.

John Hewko

Rotary’s chief executive is the son of Ukrainian parents who fled ahead of the advancing Soviet army in the 1940s and reached the United States in 1949 by way of displaced persons camps in Germany. From 1991 he served as executive secretary of the International Advisory Council to the Ukrainian Parliament in Kyiv, and he assisted the parliamentary commission that prepared the first draft of independent Ukraine’s constitution, along with its earliest laws on foreign investment, competition and company formation. He later ran law offices in Moscow, Kyiv and Prague, and negotiated $6.3 billion of foreign assistance compacts across eighteen countries as general counsel of the Millennium Challenge Corporation.

In February 2025 he set out what Rotary had done against the World Bank’s assessment: roughly two million housing units destroyed, 8,400 kilometres of road damaged, close to 300 bridges gone, more than 1,500 medical facilities damaged or destroyed. And he made the point that recovery is both physical reconstruction and psychological repair. Our founder met Mr Hewko and the Rotary International President elect at the Rotary International Assembly in Mexico in March 2026.

Dr Svitlana Krakovska

Ukraine’s foremost climate scientist. Head of the Laboratory of Applied Meteorology and Climatology at the Ukrainian Hydrometeorological Institute, senior researcher at the National Antarctic Scientific Center, and a veteran of the Second Ukrainian Antarctic Expedition. She has represented Ukraine at the IPCC since 2013, was a lead author on the Sixth Assessment Report, and pioneered regional climate modelling in Ukraine. Holder of the Order of Princess Olga, third degree. In 2022 Nature named her one of the ten people who shaped science that year.

On 27 February 2022, four days into the invasion, the IPCC was finalising the Working Group II Summary for Policymakers. Krakovska stayed on the line from Kyiv and made the argument she has made ever since: that human induced climate change and the war on Ukraine have the same roots, and those roots are fossil fuels. The delegates gave her a standing ovation.

Our founder recommended her to EarthX in March 2025 as the scientific counterpart to General David Petraeus’s address on the environmental impact of the war. She spoke at the Earth Day Women’s Summit at EarthX 2025, after twenty hours by train out of Kyiv, and in April 2026 returned to present The War on Ukraine at the Environmental Xperience. Her research on what the war has done to Ukraine’s water, soils, air and forests is the evidence base underneath everything on this site.

Andy Sabin

Andrew E. Sabin of East Hampton, New York: chairman of Sabin Metal Corporation and founder of the Andrew Sabin Family Foundation, which makes around two hundred grants a year across environmental protection, community strengthening and healthcare research. He co-founded the South Fork Natural History Museum and led the restoration of osprey and bald eagle populations on Long Island.

Andy has been sending ambulances into Ukraine since 2022. Our founder met him at EarthX in Dallas that spring, where he asked the room to help fund them, then did the unglamorous half of the job, getting vehicles across borders. In May 2026 he was still moving them from Poland. An ambulance is not a donation. It has to be sourced, bought, registered, insured, driven across three countries and handed to someone who can use it. Very few people stay with a problem that long.

Trammell S. Crow

Trammell Crow spent the first half of his career building things: Dallas Market Center, the Infomart, the Dallas Communications Center, the Studios at Las Colinas, and Trammell Crow International across Europe and Asia. In 2011 he founded what became EarthX, by 2019 drawing more than 177,000 attendees, 700 exhibitors and 450 speakers. He co-founded Texas Business for Clean Air and Texans for Clean Water and holds the Ellis Island Medal of Honor. EarthX is deliberately nonpartisan, built so that people who would never attend an environmental conference would attend this one.

For Ukraine that has meant a platform in Dallas. Andy Sabin made his first appeal for ambulances from an EarthX stage. Dr Krakovska has crossed a continent twice to speak from it. A Ukrainian delegation travels to Dallas each year. Our founder spoke at EarthX in 2022; Trammell sought him out afterwards and asked him to help with the conferences that followed. That is how a green building specialist from Newport Beach became Global Head of Strategic Partnerships at EarthX.