Urbanists became volunteers. As they help displaced persons, locals and military in Kryvyi Rih during the war - interview with activists

They organized a volunteer headquarters, accept forced displaced persons, teach first domestic aid locals, weave camouflage nets and teach the residents of Kryvyi Rih of the Ukrainian language. Video of the day how public organizations are organized in the frontline and what they do for the victory of Ukraine, Tatiana Podpalko and Oksana Lahe from the Urban City Development Agency was told on the air of Radio NV.

The Deputy Chairman of the Public Organization of the Urban City Development Agency Our NGO was established in August 2018. We are five years old. We have identified four strategic directions for ourselves. [First] - urban. [Second] is the development of tourism. We have a special tourism in the city - industrial. The third direction… We understood, given the mission of our organization that we want to make Krivoy Horn better thanks to the efforts of the public, government and business.

And we realized that without a competent and experienced public it is impossible to do so. Therefore, the third direction we determined the development of civil society organization - we held a forum for the organization of civil society. The fourth direction we planned was the development of small business, including socially directed. In 2020 we were trained in social entrepreneurship.

[Wanted to create] a hub, where public activists, authorities, business would gather, and ideas for development would be born. In our arsenal, gift the tourist city, and an urban hackathon, where almost 100 people from different cities of Ukraine were present. We planned to revitalize our industrial facilities. We also had a wonderful project for young people - the advocacy of youth projects.

We can be proud that almost 30% of these young people who have been trained when writing projects on the public budget were winners. Last year, in October, we had a very interesting festival for young people, for the whole family - a saga about Harry Potter. The project brought together at least seven thousand Kryvrozhany and guests of our city. Last year, we submitted three projects to the public budget of Kryvyi Rih and all three became winners, supported by the public.

One was directed to public space, the other was planned to install CCTV cameras. The third is Dream Fest. Its name is heroes among us, based on Marvel Heroes. This year, hostilities in Ukraine, and it will be impossible to implement these projects. They are suspended. Despite the fact that Kryvyi Rih is an almost frontier city, we want to equip the territory near the Palace of Culture - to plant almost half a thousand bushes there.

We want to attract displaced persons, who live in our city nearly 70 thousand. This territory near the Palace of Culture is called the 17th quarter. There are many displaced persons there. In fact, we do not call them, but we say new residents of Kryvyi Rih. When the war began, during the month we organized first domedic aid courses with our partners - with the Red Cross, with the charity of Hesed Khan. When it all started, no one knew what first aid was. Therefore, these courses were very necessary.

The member of the NGO Agency for the development of the urban city one of the areas of our work is to support the organizational development of the city of Kryvyi Rih. And it was in this direction that we organized the Volunteer Center together with our partners: the Kryvyi Rih Pedagogical University and the Municipal Enterprise Institute of Development of the City of Kryvyi Rih. This volunteer center began to operate on February 26 on the basis of Kryvyi Rih Pedagogical University. We still work.

Our main task is to support residents, giving them the opportunity to unload during stress, assistance to family members, as well as our territorial defense formation, and the Armed Forces. In fact, the main purpose of the activity is to support people, because they need to feel unity with the big community, to feel that their work is needed and they can do something for our fighters. It was for this purpose that the action was introduced for Easter.

We planned to give small flavors to our fighters. It resulted in a huge action, because it turned out that our grandparents were pleased to bake a variety of flavors, ranging from huge pies and real large belts, to just small chocolates and chocolates that they wanted to entertain the fighters. Now we are already working centralized, we have even a few branches. For safety, we dissected our production.