Children and young people aged 10 to 18 from eleven countries, including Germany, the United States, Portugal, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, Moldova, Hungary, Canada, Belgium and Cyprus, participated in the International project competition of «Brand Ukraine: Creating Together».
This large-scale project was organized by the International Institute of Education, Culture and Diaspora Relations, Lviv Polytechnic, together with the Sofia Ukrainian School in the United Arab Emirates. The partners of these intellectual competitions were the World Federation of Ukrainian Women’s Organizations and the UWC International Educational Coordinating Council.
The awarding of the three winning teams took place on August 30 in a mixed format: organizers and government officials, as well as individual members of the jury, gathered at Lviv Polytechnic and contacted the rest of the participants via an online platform. A total of 21 teams took part in the competition, which included 94 participants.
Young Ukrainians researched how Ukraine is perceived in their environments, what they know about our country and, most importantly, they offered their own ideas for promoting and shaping Ukraine’s image in the world.
The works of young Ukrainians were evaluated by the jury consisting of: Myroslava Barchuk, journalist and presenter at UA: FIRST, Larysa Dir, Head of the Department on Ukrainian Communities Abroad and Humanitarian Cooperation, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, Andy Hunder, Yevgeniya Petrova, Chair of the World Federation of Ukrainian Women’s Organizations (WFUWO), a member of the UWC Board of Directors, Anna de Czaski Canter, co-founder of the Centre Anne de Kyiv in Senlis (France), Yaryna Kliuchkovska, media coach, Ukrainian specialist in strategic communications, and Volodymyr Sheiko, Director General at the Ukrainian Institute.
Yurii Bobalo, Rector of Lviv Polytechnic National University, was the first to greet the participants and winners:
– I am convinced that the knowledge about Ukraine that the contestants received in their environments, preparing for the competition, will be a guide for them on the way to open our country to the world. Let us be sure that these works will play a significant role in breaking many stereotypes about Ukraine. Due to such competitions, the world will know more about us.
Oksana Levytska, Chair at the Ukrainian World Congress International Education Coordinating Council, also said that such a competition helps to unite and inspires for new achievements. She noted that the representatives of the Ukrainian diaspora, participants of the competition researched, compared and discussed, working in teams, and such work gives the best results. It is also important that Ukrainian Saturday schools in Canada have picked up the idea of creating a brand of our country and groups of students are implementing their projects to promote Ukraine within their schools.
This competition is only the first step towards the realization of the brand Ukraine. Tetiana Spivakovska, Deputy Director of the Sofia Ukrainian School in the UAE, stressed that the work is really just beginning. The next stage is the exchange of interesting ideas and their implementation.
According to the results of the jury’s points, the third place was taken by the German team led by Svitlana Bakumenko. Team members offered to create a brand of Ukraine in the IT field, as Ukraine ranks fourth in the world in the number of specialists in this field.
The second place was taken by the team from Great Britain, the coordinator of which was Lina Maksymuk. They created an original idea to promote Ukrainian dishes in their country.
The team led by Irena Datchenko won. Together with team members Christina Somoff (Sharjah, UAE), Pavlo Pavlovskyi (Kyiv, Ukraine), Viktor Datchenko (Abu Dhabi), and Ruslana Tereshchenko (Kyiv, Ukraine), they developed a concept for creating camps for foreign children with the opportunity to study interesting places in Ukraine during the trips.
All competition works can be found on the IECDR website.
