Students’ creative activities during training, October 2015
Kateryna Kliuzko, Executive Director of the Children of Hope and Love Foundation and leader of the youth NGO Heart in Palms, is an ambitious woman whose work educates younger generations through volunteering and innovative techniques. In 2015 Kateryna visited the United States to participate in the Youth Citizenship Civic Education Reform in Schools training program under the Participant Training Program (PtP), funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID).
Upon her return, Kateryna presented what she had learned her colleagues. For seven years Kateryna and her colleagues have been developing the capacity and social responsibility of high school students through trainings. Kateryna’s U.S. experience, paired with recent developments in Ukraine, helped her realize the importance of civic education for children in Ukraine. She felt a personal responsibility to use what she had learned to make an even bigger difference in the lives of Ukrainian children.
Kateryna developed a pilot project in the form of a summer camp for students: the School of Civic Engagement, Agents of Change. In June 2015, Lyshnia village (Kyiv region) hosted the first Agents of Change. For two weeks, 22 students studied communication skills and discussed civil society, community, and social participation. The summer school mirrored US schools by emphasizing principles of openness, freedom, creativity.
Kateryna Kliuzko,, Executive Director of the Children of Hope and Love Foundation
At one session, students joined a charity auction and created paintings to raise funds for the treatment of a boy with cancer. This experience showed children that they could positively impact lives and initiate social change through fundraising.
After graduating from Agents of Change, students and their teachers implemented their own projects focused on the development of local communities. In particular, they organized volunteers to clean a forest and install plates with messages addressed to local community members.
Shortly after the first summer camp, Kateryna, along with students and teachers, presented the results of Agents of Change to the representatives of the American Cultural Center at the US Embassy and the Peace Corps in Ukraine.
The next Agents of Change training focused on “Values in the Community.” This training was organized within the International Festival of Contemporary Art GOGOLFEST (September 2015) with the help of Svitlana Babinets, Head of the Department of School Education at Kyiv City State Administration, and another alumni of the PtP training program that Kateryna attended.
The success of the pilot summer camp encouraged Kateryna to cooperate with the National Center – Small Academy of Sciences for high school students, introducing civic education into the curriculum of students from schools all over Ukraine. The next series of Agents of Change programs were conducted in autumn of 2015 and spring of 2016 at the International Centre for Children’s Scientific Creativity at the Small Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (MANLAB.CAMP).
In 2016 the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine approved Kateryna’s project Agents of Change as a model for teachers at the Small Academy of Sciences.
Kateryna points to her experience participating in USAID’s PtP Ukraine program as the catalyst for so much of what she has accomplished.
“This new experience and knowledge gave me the motivation and inspiration for implementation of new projects,” Kateryna says. “It led to the creation and launch of the first school of civic engagement in Ukraine called ‘Agents of Change’”.