A dialogue meeting was held on the development of a regional program for the development of civil society in Luhansk region.
At the beginning of the meeting, they discussed the release of Presidential Decree No. 487/2021 «on the national strategy for promoting the development of civil society in Ukraine for 2021-2026», some developments of those present and certain ideas for attracting public figures at the stage of developing a regional program.
We noted a number of comments on the process of developing the document, so that it does not turn into another formal program,which will simply be rewritten from the reports of public organizations and reported.
Elena Kozlyuk, an ex-representative of the KRSE, who was present at the meeting, noted: «it is important to evaluate the emphasis and understand how to attract active participants. So that the strategy has the desired result. Everyone writes a lot of strategies, but not everyone affects the end result, not all initiatives have resources. You need to understand what your expectations are from the document. Without resources, there can be no result. Perhaps something needs to be reorganized, reviewed. We need to take into account partners and performance. Is it possible to achieve this or that result? There is a certain demand for financial stability and we need to look for partners who will be able to jointly implement the strategy, contribute, and cooperate with international partners.»
Deputy Department of mass communications of the Luhansk regional state administration Andrey Zaitsev briefly spoke about the draft Regional Program and noted: «the previous program was actually implemented by 50% in Ukraine and by 75% in the Luhansk region. The participation procedure includes public discussion of draft budgets and field meetings of Representatives in territorial communities. Such steps should ensure direct interaction between the authorities and society. In addition, it is planned to introduce competitions as the main tool for supporting CSOs. The competition should include issues of inclusion, social entrepreneurship, ensuring the sustainability of CSOs, and so on. The total amount of funding is two hundred thousand hryvnias per year, and there should be co-financing in the amount of 15 percent. First of all, such support is of an image nature and should become an incentive for socio-economic development and attracting international donor organizations. At the same time, the participation budget is the most promising tool for cooperation between AHS and society. In the future, such initiatives will be able to ensure the development of communities, and we must think about how to popularize and make this tool more effective.»
Anna Borova, a specialist of the United Nations program for the restoration and development of Peace, gave examples of the latest formats of work to involve the public in public discussions, new formats of events that promote inclusion, barrier-free, volunteering, attract young people to cooperate with adults, and on the principle of equal to equal in modern formats of events (Street, online, etc.) and even in the situation with COVID, various modern trends that increase the social activity of different groups are conveyed. She noted that it is regional programs that should include various analytical, motivational and promotional activities to encourage the development of necessary areas and further support and dissemination of influential experiments initiated by international institutions in the context of reforms.
As a result of the meeting, we decided on four strategic areas and some strategic tasks through facilitated interactive exercises. We filled out pre-prepared online questionnaire forms and decided to issue the results of discussion and generalization of the results of questionnaire forms in the form of proposals to the regional program document and include them in the draft regional program document.
The meeting in a mixed format was organized and facilitated by GISMAOVC intermediaries.