On April 5-8, 2023, a training camp was held in the city of Yaremche, which is a component of the youth initiative support program of the ARPI project "Promoting Youth Civic Participation in Decentralized Communities", which has been implemented since September 2022 with the support of the NED fund.

The participants of the training are leaders of public associations aimed at involving the creative potential of youth in local development, winners of the “Bold Dreams for Communities of Ukraine Competition”. As a result of this competition, we selected 22 representatives of initiative groups from Ukrainian communities in 17 regions of Ukraine, including Vinnytsia, Volyn, Zhytomyr, Zaporizhia, Ivano-Frankivsk, Kirovohrad, Kyiv, Luhansk, Lviv, Mykolaiv, Rivne, Sumy, Khmelnytskyi, Kherson, Chernihiv, Cherkasy, and Chernivtsi regions.

The camp program included interactive trainings on civic representation (advocacy) and on broadcasting the value proposition of cultural heritage in communities to potential stakeholders. Knowledge of heritage advocacy will be useful to the participants of the camp when planning their own public participation campaigns to achieve systemic changes in approaches to heritage. The main idea of ​​​​such campaigns is the involvement of residents in heritage issues, their awareness of personal responsibility for preserving for future generations unique tangible and intangible cultural values, passed down from generation to generation. This heritage is often the only core of the identity of communities, the subject of pride of each resident, which, however, is easy to lose due to general negligence and indifference.

A separate block of such a unique camp was devoted to the principles of preparing grant applications for the ARPI subgrant competition with co-financing from NED, aimed at involving residents of Ukrainian communities in measures to preserve their cultural heritage. After the camp, its most motivated students will be able to apply and, based on the results of the selection, receive a grant to involve residents of their communities in the preservation and promotion of cultural heritage in communities. A total of 5 sub-grants will be provided for an amount of up to $ 2,000 each. The deadline for submitting applications or “happy line” is April 28, 2023.

Let us recall that the “Heritage Ambassadors” initiative is a continuation of the projects supported by the NED “Heritage for Development” (2019 - 2020) and “Heritage for Development-2” (2020 - 2021), aimed at supporting local communities in the preservation and promotion of local heritage. Thanks to these projects, over the past three years we have introduced a number of changes to the strategic policy documents of Ukraine and expanded the scope for the involvement of Ukrainian CSOs in the preservation and management of cultural heritage. From 2019 to 2022, civil society leaders, united by project activities, prepared cultural and natural heritage interpretation plans for 18 communities from 13 regions of Ukraine, and also achieved significant progress in involving community residents in the preservation of local histories, antiquities, and even in the revitalization of “communal” castles and palaces.