Recently during a press conference in Kiev, UNV, UNDP and the Ministry of Family, Youth and Sport of the Government of Ukraine jointly launched ‘Active Youth Tested Recipes’, a handbook of best practices for youth and organizations working with youth, and a national Youth Portal to support networking among the country’s youth organizations.
The handbook and portal are among the outcomes of the UNV/UNDP project, Youth Social Inclusion for Civic Engagement in Ukraine (YSI), aimed at increasing the participation of young Ukrainians in the lives of their communities.
The handbook ‘Active Youth Tested Recipes’ contains the project’s methodology and success stories. It targets two audiences, youth and organizations working with youth, and offers a new method for working with young people by finding and supporting youth initiatives. In presenting the handbook, Eugenia Petrivska, National Manager of the UNV/UNDP YSI project, called on organizations working with youth to put the methodology into practice.
Ms Petrivska also presented the national Youth Portal stressing that it had been tailored to build a potent network of support to youth organizations in Ukraine. The Youth Portal will be supported by the Department of Youth Policy.
A framework agreement signed by UNV, UNDP and the Government of Ukraine in 2005 laid the foundation for a cooperative initiative to address the challenges of youth civic engagement in Ukraine. In 2008, UNV, UNDP and the Ministry of Family, Youth and Sports, together with other partners, launched the Youth Social Inclusion for Civic Engagement in Ukraine (YSI) project. It was aimed at increasing young Ukrainians’ participation in the lives of their communities.
Since then, the YSI Project has worked with youth centres in 12 regions of Ukraine, helping their development and sustainability. In order to run a successful activity, the Project provided youth centres with recommendations such as to share their experience, information and resources, cooperate with other organizations, and involve youth of different ages as well as of both sexes.
In order to create a solid platform for cooperation among youth organizations, the project has developed and launched the national Youth Portal at www.molodistua.org.
Since its inception, the project has created and tested methodology to improve youth organizations’ activities. The methodology has proved successful, and helped improve results of youth organizations in 52 districts. The recently published handbook of best practices, ‘Active Youth Tested Recipes’, describes this methodology together with success stories.
Notably, cooperation with the Ministry of Family, Youth and Sports has resulted in the launch of a common project. Ms. Olga Devyatkin, the UNV Portfolio Manager for Ukraine, stressed the contribution of the Youth Social Inclusion for Civic Engagement Project in the development of volunteering in Ukraine. She said, the YSI Project is UNV’s largest project in the region and has met its goal as it helped volunteers to build their skills.
“The future depends upon youth and it is important that young Ukrainians build confidence in their potential”, Ms. Devyatkin said and added, “if you doubt that, just remember the words of Anita Roddick, the human rights and environmental campaigner and founder of The Body Shop: ‘if you think you are too small to have an impact, try spending a night with a mosquito in the room’.”
Sourced from: http://www.unv.org/en/news-resources/news/doc/youth-portal-and-handbook.html
