Who has written about us
UA FEST has never bought an advertisement and has never had a paid member of staff. Everything below happened because a newsroom decided a volunteer festival in a town of 12,000 was worth the column inches. This page is the thank-you, and the record.
Each entry links to the publisher's own page. We quote one sentence and send you there — the words and the photographs belong to the newsroom that made them.
- Linda Seccaspina
- Hometown News
- 107.7 WOW FM
- The Lanarkist
- Lanark-Leeds Today
- The Millstone
Linda Seccaspina
Carleton Place writer and local historian
Community page··Linda Seccaspina
Let's Sign Gary Strike's Flag for his friend Gene Nowiski
Some projects are made with fabric, thread and signatures. Others are stitched together with memories, friendship and a little piece of someone's heart.
Linda Seccaspina, 27 August 2026 Linda Seccaspina has been writing Carleton Place's memory down in public for years, and this post is one of the reasons we keep reading her. It is about Gary Strike's Canadian/Ukrainian Friendship Flag — a flag he began filling with signatures, could not finish, and has asked her to complete. Behind it is a friendship that started in 1948, when a Ukrainian family arrived in Canada and their four-year-old son became the first best friend of a two-year-old boy from here. Linda is bringing the flag to Riverside Park on 13 September so people can sign the Ukrainian side. Thank you, Linda — a festival can put on a stage, and it still cannot manufacture a story like that one.
Hometown News
Carleton Place, Perth, Smiths Falls, Mississippi Mills and the Rideau Lakes
Feature·
Record-Setting Embroidered Cloth Coming to Carleton Place
A 160.5-metre embroidered cloth created by communities across Europe will be displayed outside the continent for the first time during UA FEST in Carleton Place this September.
Hometown News, 6 August 2026 Hometown News was the first newsroom anywhere to carry the rushnyk story — they ran it the day after we sent it, and their opening sentence is a cleaner statement of the fact than the one in our own release. That matters more than it looks: a European record arriving in a town of 12,000 sounds like a press release until a paper the county actually reads has put its name on it. Every outlet we have written to since has been able to see that somebody local checked it first. Thank you to the Hometown News desk for moving quickly and for getting the number, the date and the claim exactly right.
Hometown News
Hometown Happenings — the weekly weekend guide
Listing··Laurie Weir
From PorchFest to petting zoos: Hometown Happenings your weekend guide close to home
Celebrate Ukrainian culture through food, music, and community at this year's Ukrainian Festival in Lanark County.
Hometown News, 11 September 2025 Laurie Weir's Hometown Happenings is the column half of Lanark County plans its Saturday around, and in September 2025 she put us in it — between the Carleton Place Farmers' Market and PorchFest, with the Kids of Ukraine Project named as where the money was going. A listing in a trusted weekly guide moves more people through a gate than any advertisement we could afford, and we could not afford one. Thank you, Laurie.
107.7 WOW FM
myFM, Arnprior — What's Good in the Valley
Interview··myFM News / 107.7 WOW FM News Staff
What's Good in the Valley: 'Phenomenal' expected to continue at Saturday's Ukrainian Festival in Carleton Place
It began as a simple neighbourhood event to help a Ukrainian emigre family get settled in Lanark County.
107.7 WOW FM, 11 September 2025 107.7 WOW FM sat down with festival director Olga Ialovenko before the 2025 festival and asked the questions that produce a record rather than a promo: how the volunteer crew had grown past the Ukrainian community, who the day is actually aimed at, and what changed when Carleton Place town council designated UA FEST a culturally significant event. Their first line — a neighbourhood event to help one family settle — is still the truest sentence anyone has written about how this started. Thank you to the newsroom in Arnprior for treating a small-town festival as news worth an interview.
The Lanarkist
independent local news for Lanark County
Listing·
Carleton Place gears up for a weekend of family-friendly community events and celebrations
The festivities begin on Saturday, Sept. 13, with the Ukrainian Festival at Riverside Park.
The Lanarkist, 9 September 2025 The Lanarkist opened its Carleton Place weekend preview with us — first item, ahead of PorchFest — and told readers what to expect from the day in plain terms: folk music, homemade perogies and cabbage rolls, and neighbours turning up for each other while the war went on. Being the sentence a weekend starts with is a small thing to write and a large thing to receive. Thank you.
Hometown News
Carleton Place, Perth, Smiths Falls, Mississippi Mills and the Rideau Lakes
Feature·
Ukrainian Festival returns to Lanark County with heart, flavour and community spirit
Lanark County's Ukrainian Festival is making a vibrant return this year, bringing Canadians and Ukrainians together through music, food, tradition and connection.
Hometown News, 3 September 2025 This is the piece that carried the whole 2025 festival to the county: the food, the artisan market, the business speed-dating, the Kids of Ukraine Project, and the line our organisers had been saying to each other for two years — that the aim is the most genuine festival rather than the biggest one. Hometown News printed it as it was said. Thank you for the room, and for describing a grassroots effort without making it sound smaller than it is.
The Lanarkist
independent local news for Lanark County
Feature··Hollie Pratt-Campbell
Lanark County Ukrainian Festival returns with food, music and tradition
Lanark County's Ukrainian Festival will return this fall, bringing together Canadians and Ukrainians through food, music and cultural traditions.
The Lanarkist, 26 August 2025 Hollie Pratt-Campbell wrote the first proper feature of the 2025 season, three weeks out, when a festival most needs one. The Lanarkist has also covered the wider story this county has been living — the twinning agreement between Smiths Falls and Zolochiv, for one — which is why a Ukrainian festival reads there as local news instead of as somebody else's culture. Thank you, Hollie.
Lanark-Leeds Today
myFM, Perth — Lake 88.1
Report from the day··Bob Perreault
Ukrainian Festival draws big crowd in Carleton Place
A Ukrainian children's choir gave an inspiring voice to the event and a traditional unrolling of the Ukrainian flag brought cheers from participants.
Lanark-Leeds Today, 23 September 2024 Bob Perreault came to Riverside Park on the first day of fall in 2024 and filed from inside the crowd, which is a different thing from filing from a listing. He wrote down the children's choir, the flag unrolling that brought the field to its feet, and where the money went — mental-health rehabilitation for children and families in Ukraine. It is the only contemporaneous report of that day by anyone outside our own committee, so it is now part of how the festival remembers itself. Thank you, Bob.
The Millstone
volunteer-run, ad-free community newspaper for Mississippi Mills
Community page·
The 1st Lanark County Ukrainian Festival, November 5
Our festival started as a fundraising garage sale of Gloria Bradley to help a Ukrainian family at their very start in Carleton Place.
From the announcement the festival sent in, which The Millstone published in full. The Millstone takes no advertising and is run entirely by volunteers, and in October 2023 it printed the announcement of the very first festival exactly as we sent it — 500 guests expected, an arena in Carleton Place, a garage sale as the origin story. Nobody was famous, nothing was proven, and a newspaper gave it a page anyway. Everything on the rest of this list follows from newsrooms like that one deciding a thing was worth printing before there was any evidence it would work. Thank you to Almonte's volunteer paper for going first.
Add yours to this page
Published something we have missed, or filing one now? Send the link to press@uafest.ca and it goes up here. Photography, the fact sheet, boilerplate and the people who will pick up the phone are on the press kit. Interviews are available in English and Ukrainian — +1 (613) 621-1261.