I’ve been a part of the Peace Corps Ukraine quarterly newsletter (NuShcho) for about a year now. I’ve also been in charge of the newsletter for a year of that time. It’s been a bit of both a low-key and demanding editorial job. Today, I submitted the last issue with me at the helm.

I’m not sad. I’m ready to move on to bigger and better things. I took my year in charge and I cleaned up the process and expanded our role.

When I first joined NuShcho, we had an editorial process that involved emailing documents back and forth and we kept track of everyone’s work using track changes. Personally, I thought it was a nightmare. There was a lot of, “Who has the most recent copy?” and this was only among three editors. I quickly switched our small operation over to a Gmail account and made sure everyone was on board with using Google Docs to share and edit and keep the track changes intact. Granted, it took an issue to iron out the kinks but it was a whole different game. I hope it sticks after I leave.

I’m a big proponent of the internet. I love the ease of information sharing. In college, I worked for one of our student newspapers, posting the stories to the website daily. It made sense. It was easy to pass along links and it increased our readership tenfold. NuShcho needed this innovative technology. It needed to be brought to the internet in pieces so it can be shared with friends and family, easily.

I worked along with members of the Technology for Development working group in Peace Corps Ukraine (of which I’m the president) to bring together a student newspaper-like experience for reading NuShcho. In years past, NuShcho was printed and distributed to volunteers. In an effort to cut costs, it was emailed to volunteers in PDF format. Today, I officially launched NuShcho Online and I truly hope that it gets used by everyone, not just volunteers, to share articles with friends and family back in the States about projects we’ve been working on. I hope volunteers share their published stories with the Ukrainians who help with and attended their events. I hope it gets used and I hope it continues to be used in the future.

I feel like I put a lot of effort into making NuShcho a bit more than it was. I’m happy with my efforts. It was a learning experience and a bragging point. I seriously just hope these changes keep getting used.