CSU alum organizes Ukraine aid hub in Romania

By Grant Coursey @grantcoursey

Colorado State University graduate, father of a CSU graduate and Fort Collins local Anthony Sundermeier has a storied career mastering roles in supply chain logistics, human resources, sales and marketing. He retired in 2018.

While working at Intel, Sundermeier ended up in charge of Intel’s global warehousing and was given one of the 2008 Olympic torches for growing Intel’s Lenovo account from $500 million to $1.5 billion in only three years.

A successful career in the private sector was not always Sundermeier’s goal. He started his career wanting to do humanitarian aid work. He recently came out of retirement to do just that, creating the most successful aid distribution warehouse on the UkrainianRomanian border and organizing the distribution of thousands of tons of aid to Ukraine.

Sundermeier was sitting on his couch watching the news coverage of the war in Ukraine in late February 2022, getting angrier and angrier, when a chance phone call with an old friend created an opportunity for him to get involved.

Sundermeier’s friend had just landed in Romania and asked Sundermeier to come out and help him turn an old manufacturing facility into an aid warehouse.

“ at was on a Tuesday,” Sundermeier said. “Wednesday I booked my flight, ursday I was on my way to Romania (and) I showed up Friday.” e first week, they completely renovated the warehouse, making upwards of 300 changes to get the space operational and running, Sundermeier said.

“I was only supposed to be there for about a week, actually,” Sundermeier said. “(My friend) thought three or four days, but I booked two weeks. ( en) another nongovernmental organization came in and said, ‘We want you to be the director of the warehouse,’ and I said, ‘Well, OK, until you find somebody,’ and that was almost a year ago.” e NGO that brought him on as the director of the warehouse was the Romulus T. Weatherman Foundation. e organization coruns the warehouse with IsraAID, a separate NGO based out of Israel. e warehouse, based out of Tulcea, Romania, boasts a virtually perfect delivery rate, having lost only nine pallets out of a total of about 12,000, Sundermier said.

Sundermeier is proud of the work the warehouse has been able to accomplish in the year it has been up and running.

“ e number 99.9% delivered into a warzone would be fantastic if I was working for Intel or Apple in delivery,” Sundermeier said. “So the fact that we are doing it in the warzone (as a small NGO) is amazing.” e warehouse has shipped aid of all shapes and sizes, such as generators used to help hospitals like the Odesa Regional Children’s Clinical Hospital during the power outages, a water treatment truck bound for Mykolaiv, Ukraine, truckloads of medicine and even thousands upon thousands of pounds of onions the warehouse once received.

“We’ll ship anything,” Sundermeier said. “ ere hasn’t been a single thing they wanted (to be) shipped through here that we haven’t shipped, but it’s a different thing every day. ere’s not a routine to it, and you just don’t know what’s going to happen next, and I really enjoy that aspect of it. e motto of our hub is, ‘We’ll figure it out.’” e operation would not be possible without the incredible people working, Sundermeier said. e team working at the hub includes lawyers, engineers, logisticians and ex-special forces members, all coming together from around the world, speaking a smorgasbord of languages and using Google Translate and broken translations to run the most successful aid hub in Romania. e team includes people like the affectionately nicknamed “Charlie’s Angels” — three Ukrainian women who were forced to evacuate their home during the first Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, only to relocate to Kyiv, Ukraine, where their home was again damaged in the bombing and missile strikes of the most recent invasion last February. ey now work at the warehouse with Sundermeier.

At the peak of the hub’s operation, it was turning out 10 truckloads a day of aid to Ukraine and at one point even sent several barges of aid up the Danube River bound for Odesa, Ukraine.

Sundermeier’s wife, Natalie Sundermeier, also worked at the hub for roughly two months and helped set up the communication system used to direct and keep in touch with the ex-special forces team delivering the aid once it had left the hub.

Each member of the team at the hub has a superhero nickname, Sundermeier said. He is Tony Stark-Iron Man, but the Hulk, Captain Marvel, Starlord and many others are represented by members of the team doing aid work on the border.

Reach Grant Coursey at news @collegian.com.