Why I organized Ostapenko Foundation, and why HowUSA came first
On August 12, 2026, the State of Ohio recorded Ostapenko Foundation as a nonprofit corporation. I organized it for educational and literary work: researching confusing systems, turning the findings into plain language and publishing the result for free.
The first project is HowUSA.
HowUSA is a public information portal for people who are planning a move to the United States or already live there and prefer to read in Russian, Ukrainian or Belarusian. The first release includes 20 core articles, 60 language documents, 97 public pages and six visual explanations.
The portal covers documents, work, housing, money, health care, immigration procedures and contact with government offices. The purpose is simple: help the reader understand the next step and open the official source before signing, paying or sending personal information.
There is also an AI assistant named Luna. The first version answered only from the indexed article corpus. That was safe, but too rigid. An indirect question within a HowUSA topic failed because the wording did not closely match the stored material.
No one was harmed. It happened during controlled testing. I changed Luna to a topic-scoped design, so it can now provide a short general route when no exact article exists. The portal remains its first source, and direct prompt injection plus clearly unrelated questions are still rejected before the model call.
Protective prompts always trade flexibility for control. The real work is calibrating that balance.
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