Overcast weather and feeling sleepy due to it, being late and out of coffee. Probably not the best start for a successful meeting. But we had it. On the February week-end of 2 and 3 a group of activists met in Kharkiv to discuss what is happening in SVIT in the coming months, plan upcoming activities like YTNF film festival and training on project management, take a look at new SVIT web-site and decide about its future update and new features. Representatives of partner organizations “Pechenegy” and “Friends of Gomolshansky forest” joined part of the meeting. Other topics were new LTV projects – two have just started in Donetsk (informal gender education) and Lugansk (development activities for children), and two more are being prepared (environmental in National Nature Park “Gomolshansky Lisy” and disabilities at the rehabilitation center “Raduga”). We had brainstorm on other potential partners and activities and decided to make a call for project partners, which will be disseminated among our partners and contacts.

One of the big topics of the meeting were short-term volunteer projects, or workcamps this summer – local partners, work, funding, campleaders, number of local and international volunteers, dates for projects. New projects in the program are workcamps with disabled young people and children. And we’ll have also projects on environmental topic, gender (with new partners and new program this year), renovation and activities with children, and hopefully anti-racism and human rights (which depends on still not confirmed funding). We also talked about promotion of camps to have more Ukrainian young people involved.

The working meeting took place in the framework of project “Creation of coordinating centers on long-term volunteering”, with support of Zukunftsfonds Berlin.