Project 1/12: Akmene District Municipality (Lithuania) – Cities of Mariupol, Avdijvkia and Shostka (Ukraine)

For the second time, PLATFORMA has decided to reward the best city-to-city and region-to-region international cooperation projects. Twelve projects have been shortlisted out of 26 applications. Every day, we are presenting one new project (sorted by alphabetical order). This is how the Akmene District Municipality in Lithuania is presenting its partnership with the Cities of Mariupol, Avdijvkia and Shostka in Ukraine.

“After the 2015 crisis in Ukraine, many refugees reached our [Lithuanian] municipalities for safe heaven in the EU. We have established good contacts with many of those people and have created the NGO ,,Way to Dream” to write project for development cooperation program in order to help people who still live in war zones in Ukraine.

This NGO has successfully implemented 3 development cooperation projects:

• In 2017, thanks to the project ,,Bridge” in Mariupol city a cabinet to help young people with mental issues was established
• In 2018, the project ,,Way to the future” tried to help to increase entrepeneurship of young women with social problems.
• In June 2019, the goal of the ,,Summer caleidoscope” was to help teachers from Schostk city to increase there competencies working with non-formal education.

All those projects helped many people in Mariupol city, Schostk city and many other places in Ukraine.”