Aly Owens is passionate about Ukraine. In 2014 she became an active volunteer at Nova Ukraine, a San Francisco based Ukrainian american non-profit where she led several fundraisers for purchasing humanitarian aid and culture promoting events. Aly Owens was born in Izmail, Ukraine and today she works as a sr product manager at a major company in the Seattle area. She’s passionate about connecting art with tech and driving innovations. At Volia Aly focuses on fundraisers dedicated to Ukrainian defense.
Meet one more co-founder of Volia Fund Tetiana Novokhatska. In her own words: “I am an entrepreneurial leader with executive touch who enjoys transforming organizations that push the boundaries of what's possible. I excel at solving complex business problems and getting the result in a creative, fast, and robust way. Started as a Software Engineer, Mathematician, and Systems Analyst with 20 years of work experience and 12+ years of the leadership track. I am used to operating in a fast-paced, constantly changing environment. I delivered business results as software products and solutions end-to-end in a complex multi-year, multi-site, cross-functional setting. I have created organizations, processes, and solutions and facilitated complex decisions with internal and external c-level stakeholders. This includes a large-scale (1200+ people) distributed multinational organization and building an organizational and operational structure for it that includes all the required processes in people management, personnel management, performance appraisal, distributed team management, and financial management. Worked with USA, European, and APAC customers from start-ups to Fortune 100. I have managed remote, distributed, and collocated teams and took part in product management and development. Established software development process, built teams and all the tools and training they need. I love Ukraine and have always seen my mission as creating high-tech jobs in Ukraine and for Ukrainians as well as promoting Ukraine as a destination to invest and do business with and in. With the start of a full-scale russian invasion, I realized the need for more hands-on involvement in different high-tech projects and this is how Volia Fund emerged – through a collaboration of like-minded smart Ukrainians who are aiming to promote well-being in Ukraine by applying our professional experience with high-tech.”
I’m an engineering leader with vast hands-on experience and a strong bias to action. My passion is in taking ideas from the realm of mental exercise and turning them into concrete functioning implementations, be that software architectures, people organizations, or fun pet projects. As an engineer, I am fluent in disassembling robust, complex (and sometimes unwieldy) concepts into atomic parts and reassembling them into elegant and coherent forms. Being drawn to learning and knowledge harnessing, I graduated from Kyiv-Mohyla academy and went on to continue honing my skills at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and TU-Dresden. Having graduated from all three with an MSc degree I turned my focus to industry and spent some good years laying the foundation for what is known as Grammarly.com now. Being drawn to excellence I am compelled to learn from the best in my field. This pursuit led me to Silicon Valley, where I contributed to some of the major enterprises. Solutions I built or contributed to are responsible for millions in revenue and savings. The teams I was part of were recognized by the Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards. In 2013 I flew back to Kyiv to join the Maidan protests and subsequent Revolution of Dignity in Kyiv, Ukraine. Ever since the war started in 2014 I have been volunteering in California and building more in-depth relations with the growing civil society in Ukraine. I joined the boards of Ukrainian NGOs and helped kick-start several long-format media aimed at combating shallow propaganda and disinformation. With the beginning of the full-scale invasion in 2022, it became clear that higher ROI is needed. I joined forces with like-minded friends of mine and Volia Fund was born
Yuliia is an internationally trained physician, a psychotherapist in training, a certified peer support specialist, and a Ukraine-certified military mental health support specialist. Yuliia's primary area of interest lies in supporting veterans who have experienced war traumas, particularly those who have lost their limbs in combat, aiming to provide comprehensive physical and psychological rehabilitation.
