The practical training of the 4th-year students majoring in 231 "Social Work" of Ushynsky University goes far beyond Odesa. While undergoing internship at the "Young Community" Charitable Foundation, future specialists joined real project activities and shared their knowledge with young people from other regions of Ukraine.
The students independently developed and conducted an online leadership training. Their audience was members of the school parliaments of two communities at once: the Rudkivka Volodymyr Zherebny Secondary School of I-III degrees (Sambir district, Lviv region) and the Dubechne village lyceum of the Dubechne village council (Kovel district, Volyn region).
This work is part of a large-scale educational program for the development of youth leadership, which the "Young Community" Charitable Foundation is implementing with the financial support of the European Youth Foundation of the Council of Europe.
It was not just a training on leadership in general. The key topic was the innovative model for Ukraine, “Public Budget 2.0”, also known as the “Citizen Token System” (CTS). Students and schoolchildren discussed how young people can get involved in new opportunities for the development of their communities.
The foundation explains: the traditional public budget (PB 1.0) usually gave residents the right to vote based on their registration at the place of residence. However, war, mass internal migration and a significant number of IDPs have posed a serious challenge to this principle. In addition, communities are forced to look for more efficient ways to use resources. The new approach “PB 2.0” proposes to combine broad participation of residents (participatory approach) with support for community resilience – one of the most powerful social trends of today.
For the students of Ushynsky University, participation in such a project was an important experience. They not only applied their knowledge in practice, but also actually became part of the implementation of the latest social technologies in Ukrainian communities, overcoming any geographical distances.
