On 6-8 December, the Academy of Ukrainian Press (AUP) held a training in Zaporizhzhya for 15 journalists of the oblast on coverage of decentralisation in Ukraine, organised with the support of the U-LEAD with Europe Programme.  

U-LEAD employee Maksym Kitsyuk talked to several event participants and trainers.

Vitaliy Zahaynyi, co-founder and head of the Centre for Civil Initiatives since 2013, technologist, moderator, trainer and organiser of public business events, expert in self-governance and self-organisation, co-founder of the AUP:

“I would say, the training is quite good – very interesting with a significant difference from the previous ones: it gathered representatives of the Zaporizhzhya Oblast, except for one person from the city of Dnipro, which gives us the opportunity to focus more closely on the AHs of one oblast. It is also very good that there are many chief editors creating a news feed and materials’ request. It is evident that they are interested, because they came here with a very high level of motivation, besides, interestingly enough, they have already written on this topic before. Regarding the available knowledge – many participants had an idea of ​​some or other issues, but even today, after our work on the topic, we observe them agreeing on the need to change it in a slightly different way.”

Viktor Sosnytsky (Informator Zaporizhzhya website):

“Frankly speaking, most of the information received during the training was known to me, but I was interested in the current state of affairs in the Zaporizhzhya Oblast. I saw that our AHs have advanced experience. I learned that our hromadas are among the top 20 best AHs in Ukraine, in particular the Veselivska AH showing in fact the best practices. Though now we need to wait for one, two or three years until the reform is felt everywhere, by even those who did not believe in it. Just in 2020 or so, when a sufficient number of specialists appear and high-quality information campaign is conducted, there will be a good result, and not an imitation of the reform led by Roman Bezsmertnyi in 2005. As far as before, we used to imitate rather than do something. And now we see another result.”

Vladlena Machulska and Maryna Chupys, students of the Zaporizhzhya National Technical University and future journalists:

“We came here to find out what decentralisation is, its essence and how it influenced different regions of Ukraine. We are looking forward to writing a good material for the student newspaper and our university website. This is our first experience of participating in such kind of events, and it is very interesting here: the trainers explain  a rather cognitive material comprehensively, especially for us as future journalists, but honestly, it is not enough. Therefore, we plan to attend similar training programmes in future.”

It is worth reminding that this week similar events will take place in Mykolayiv and Cherkasy. Registration is possible by the following link: http://www.aup.com.ua/mediashkola-decentralizacii-dlya-ukra-3/