In 2007, aces Coaltion member, FriendsOfUkraine-PeaceCorps (FoU-PC), contributed remotely to this “Energy Sisters” installation of small wind turbines on the Black Sea coast in sunny, windy Crimea near Yalta, where aces RenewableEnergy GreenTeam (RE GT) member, Harry Stevens, had served for a second-year in the Peace Corps after having taught business classes for a year at Kherson National Technical University (KNTU). In 2003 KNTU formed a sister college partnership with Riverland Community College (RCC) headquartered in AustinMN, the home base for aces, a co-sponsor of the above continuing Energy Sisters projects, within the context of KNTU-RCC Sister Colleges as well as potential Kherson-Austin sister schools and eventually sister cities.  By mid-2009, http://co.net/sisters will become a Virtual Sisters website through which partnerships may develop not only between Minnesota and southern Ukrainian cities like Kherson or Simferopol, where Ecology and Peace (Ekologia i Mir, EiM) and other potential sister colleges are based, but also among such current Sister Cities as Santa Barbara, California, USA and Yalta, Crimea, Ukraine.

The origin of the current Virtual Sisters of Ukraine project has been supported by a series of grants, the first in 2000 from Peace Corps Ukraine, to conduct five free-trade zone seminars, the first of which aimed at attracting foreign investment to develop wind and solar energy facilities in Crimea.  A second Peace Corps Ukraine grant in early 2001 funded newspaper, radio and TV dialogs about “Clean Energy for Crimea” which also was the title of a 100-person “Yalta conference” in April 2001, funded by the Climate Change Section of USAID as the third in the series of what has now become eight or nine grants. A fourth US Ecolinks grant contributed to training for the installation of such small wind turbines as those pictured above.  Such training is further envisioned via the sister colleges program currently under development at not only KNTU and RCC but elsewhere such as within the State of Washington, which sent half a dozen wind, solar, and energy conservation experts to the 2001 Yalta conference, whose co-hosts were EiM and California’s Center for Safe Energy (CSE). Another grant in 2003 from the National Peace Corps Association (NPCA) to FoU-PC was divided in 2005 to support distance-learning experiments between L’viv and Kansas as well as between Kherson and Minnesota. The current Sisters of Ukraine (SoU) website development project has recently been funded by grants again from FoU-PC and Minnesota Returned Peace Corps Volunteers (MnRPCV) as well as by a matching grant from RCC’s Global Education Committee (RCC Global Ed).  Members of aces now serve on the SoU Advisory Group in order to ensure that renewable energy courses will soon become a significant portion of the distance-learning curriculum to be offered among sister colleges, schools, and cities within both Ukraine and the US.