The project “Youth for the Future of Ukraine: Dialogue, Research and Creative Media Work for the Consolidation of Ukrainian Society and Orthodoxy” has now been running for five months.
During this time, the teams have learned how to facilitate dialogue, ask questions, listen to different perspectives, work with media, and create their own informational and creative products. Particular attention within the project has been given to the common good, values, social cohesion, the role of young people in Ukraine’s recovery, and the search for answers to the questions of what the country should look like after the war and what we want it to be already today.
Lectures, training sessions, summer schools, webinars, strategic sessions, and youth forums have gradually helped participants develop skills that are now ready to be tested in practice.
The moment has come for learning to turn into action.
Dialogue as a Tool for a Shared Future
One of the project’s key ideas is that the country’s future cannot be built solely on ready-made answers handed down to young people. It must be discussed and shaped together.
That is why the next stage of the project involves a series of moderated discussions and dialogues in different cities and communities. Young facilitators who have received relevant training are now organising and leading meetings themselves, working together with local teams and under the guidance of experienced experts.
Participants will discuss issues that directly affect their lives: what Ukraine should be like, what kind of community and city they want to live in, what unites society, and how different groups within it can find common ground.
A separate strand will focus on dialogue within religious communities, addressing, among other things, ideas for a Ukrainian metanarrative and a possible unifying metanarrative for Ukrainian Orthodoxy.
In total, this stage of the project will include:
- 24 moderated discussions on the topics “The Ukraine We Want to Build: A Youth Perspective” and “Ideas for a Ukrainian Metanarrative”;
- 18 dialogues entitled “The City I Want to Live In”;
- 12 dialogues within religious communities.
This amounts to a total of 54 in-person discussion and dialogue events.
At the same time, every event receives professional support. Young facilitators take part in a preliminary briefing, receive assistance in preparing the structure of the conversation and the questions, and after each meeting participate in a debriefing and receive feedback. At this stage, the online sessions primarily serve as supervision and support, while the main conversations with young people take place directly within their communities.
From “What Do We Think?” to “What Can We Change?”
For the project, simply collecting the opinions of young people is not enough.
Dialogue should help reveal what lies behind those opinions: which values are shared, where disagreements arise, which problems young people consider genuinely important, what prevents them from taking action, and what changes they would like to see in their communities and country.
The results of these discussions will not simply be recorded. They will become material for the youth teams’ further journalistic, media, and creative work.
This is fundamental to the project’s logic: young people are not merely participants in events, but co-authors of the content.
How It Is Already Working: The Experience of Teams from the Kharkiv and Poltava Regions
In late September and early October, youth teams in the Kharkiv region held a series of in-person meetings focused on security, statehood, civic participation, and personal life strategies.
For example, during the interactive meeting “Your Safety Is Your Responsibility,” 15 participants discussed civil security not as a set of instructions, but as a system of shared responsibility. Through practical scenarios and a team quiz, they explored how different services interact, who is responsible for security, and what role an ordinary person plays within this system.
Another meeting – a screening of Darkest Hour followed by an open dialogue on statehood, choice, and responsibility – brought together 20 invited guests. The film served merely as a starting point for a conversation about statehood, leadership, interaction between government and society, and the limits of compromise.
Interestingly, at the beginning of the discussion, participants were asked to name their first association with the word “statehood.” Most often, they named people (45% of participants), followed by history (20%), laws (20%), and territory (15%). This made it possible to build the subsequent discussion around a simple but important question: can a state be strong without a responsible society that is prepared to act together?
Another team from the Slobozhanshchyna region asked: “What does it mean to build the state today if you are young?”
The discussion covered volunteering, youth and civil society organisations, student self-government, youth councils, local initiatives, professional activity, public service, and participation in decision-making.
At the same time, the 23 participants in the dialogue meeting also discussed what prevents young people from being consistently active. The barriers they identified included lack of time, insufficient information, lack of confidence that young people’s opinions would be taken into account, and uncertainty about where to begin.
This is precisely where one of the project’s main goals becomes evident: not merely to encourage young people to be active, but to create an environment in which they can move from expressing an individual opinion to collective discussion, from discussion to an idea, and from an idea to concrete action.
What Will Make Young People Stay?
A different emphasis emerged in discussions in the Poltava region. Here, much of the conversation focused on the region’s future, its cultural potential, and one of the most pressing problems identified by participants – the outflow of young people.
One of the discussions brought together 25 participants. They sought to understand why young people choose other cities or move abroad, and what could make the Poltava region more attractive for living, studying, and professional development.
Among the reasons identified were a lack of modern spaces for self-realisation, a limited range of creative jobs, insufficient opportunities for professional development, and a sense of inadequate involvement in decision-making processes within local communities.
Participants also analysed the work of youth councils, centres, and civil society organisations. One of the questions raised during the discussions was whether traditional forms of youth policy are sufficient to engage young people today.
Funding or Self-Organisation?
One of the most contentious issues in the Poltava region was the question of what is essential for the development of youth initiatives: support from the authorities or young people’s own initiative?
Some participants emphasised the need for funding, premises, and support from government institutions. Others argued that young people should not wait for ready-made resources, but can create their own initiatives and attract grant funding.
The debate did not end with a single definitive answer. At the same time, it revealed something important about dialogue: participants perceive youth policy not only as the responsibility of the state or local authorities, but also as a space for their own initiative and self-organisation.
During another discussion, this topic was taken further: participants debated whether formal youth councils and institutions should be restored or whether flexible grassroots initiatives might prove more effective.
Another point of disagreement concerned development priorities: what matters more – cultural spaces and events, or an economic foundation in the form of jobs, coworking spaces, and business incubators?
Tradition or Modernisation?
Culture occupied a special place in the discussions in the Poltava region.
Participants talked about how the region’s rich historical and cultural heritage could be transformed into a modern resource for community development.
Here, too, a tension emerged. Some participants stressed the need to preserve traditions and authenticity. Others spoke about the need for modernisation – the development of IT hubs, contemporary youth spaces, urban development, creative industries, and street art.
Interestingly, this discussion effectively brought participants back to one of the project’s central questions: how can we combine what has already shaped Ukrainian and local identity with what can help communities develop in the future?
From Ideas to the Next Step
During one of the discussions in the Poltava region, participants formulated more than 10 specific initiatives – ranging from creating a youth hub to launching a mentoring programme for young entrepreneurs.
Participants also agreed to systematise the ideas they had developed and turn them into proposals for local communities.
At the same time, the team reports also recorded what could not be accomplished during the meetings themselves. Because of time constraints, participants were unable to develop a step-by-step implementation mechanism for every idea. Some of these proposals will therefore be taken forward by initiative groups.
This is an important outcome of the dialogue format itself: not every meeting has to end with a ready-made solution. Sometimes the result is a more clearly defined problem, an encounter between different positions, and a better understanding of what needs to be worked on next.
Different Regions – Different Questions, a Shared Demand
The meetings in the Kharkiv and Poltava regions took place in different contexts and had different emphases.
In Slobozhanshchyna, discussions more often returned to questions of statehood, responsibility, youth participation, social cohesion, and interaction between citizens and state institutions.
In the Middle Dnipro region, greater emphasis was placed on the outflow of young people, youth infrastructure, cultural development, professional opportunities, self-organisation, and finding a balance between tradition and modernisation.
But in both cases, young people spoke not only about problems. They sought to answer a more practical question: what should their own role be in the future of their community and country?
That is why the project considers not only the discussions themselves important, but also the subsequent processing of their results. The ideas, arguments, questions, and proposals that emerge during these meetings will become material for the youth teams’ further analytical, creative, and media work.
Dialogue Is Not About Finding the “Right” Answer
At this stage of the project, the very principle of conversation is important.
Dialogue does not mean that everyone must think alike by the end. Its purpose is to create a space where people can express their own position, hear another perspective, ask questions, see a problem from a different angle, and together identify what can become the basis for joint action.
For the young facilitators, this is also a practical learning experience.
They are no longer merely listening to lessons about facilitation – they are facilitating. They are no longer merely studying journalism – they are working with real stories and the results of real discussions. They are no longer merely talking about social dialogue – they are creating spaces where that dialogue actually takes place.
More meetings in local communities lie ahead, bringing new voices, uncomfortable questions, different perspectives, and new outcomes.
And it is through these dozens of local conversations that an answer is gradually emerging to the project’s larger question: what kind of Ukraine do we want to build – and what can each of us do to help make it a reality?
The “Youth for the Future of Ukraine” project is implemented by the Sophia Brotherhood with the support of the German Government (zivik / ifa).
