Online Youth Camp
In the situation of the growing economic crisis in Europe and Ukraine in particular, young people should not lose their opportunities due to the budget cuts, as they are the main driving force in these times of uncertainty. Young cultural activists should focus more on growing sustainable local communities which can contribute to the global cultural thriving. In response to this, from 16 June June to 3 July, the Danish Cultural Institute has organised an online cultural camp for young people from Ukraine. Due to its digital nature, youngsters from all over Ukraine could take part in this training.
For 3 weeks the 18 participants have been taking part in the online sessions, doing homework and exploring the new tools and methods presented by our experts.
The first week had a focus on giving tools on preparation, planning and research, the second week – on sense-making, creation and testing and the last week was about evaluation, learning, sharing and harvesting. All these tools are rooted in the topics of cultural leadership, cultural planning and participation.
The camp was led and facilitated by 2 “kaospilots”, Jeppe Pachaï and Victor Tambo from Denmark, who were joined by architectural designer and urbanist Liva Kreislere from Latvia and co-founder of the NGO Cultural Geographies, Valerie Karpan from Ukraine. The objective was to give a basic skill set of cultural leadership and cultural planning to the participants while exploring opportunities for cultural and participatory arts, which should inspire to generally exploring opportunities for participation in the neighbourhoods and local communities surrounding them.
Participants had a chance to work in a group or alone and to create a prototype of the projects that they would like to implement within their communities. The final prototypes included cultural city quest, interactive festival, an Instagram account with observations, public platform for visualisation of experiences, city mapping, and all of them were targeted at the community well-being as well as building the awareness on important topics.
It was an exciting experience for both project members and participants and we hope to meet these young people outside Zoom next year in the upcoming Ukrainian-Danish Youth House!
