Name of the organization/initiative and year of foundation

NGO “Different Education” was established in 2008. The main office is located in Kyiv.

Mission

The mission of the organization: “We bring learning back to life. We celebrate change. We help communities to become self-sufficient.” The organization’s vision is aimed at the horizontal, self-sufficient communities that use the potential of diversity for development. These communities are capable of transforming themselves and other people in a complex world.

Actions and projects in the context of armed conflict

“Different Education” is an NGO and professional community that develops curricula in culture and art as forms of collective learning, and creates mental and physical education spaces. The “Dialogue for Change” project aims to help overcome social divides by strengthening civil society and dialogue in Ukraine. The program works at several levels.

At the local level, it includes programs for the development of civic engagement and peaceful dialogue that consist of 14 seminars for approximately 280 young people from eight regions of Ukraine. During six workshops, sixty young professionals learned how to be “community animators” as a part of an informal civic education program.

At the European level, it includes 12 long-term partnerships (tandems) between Ukrainian and German/European civil society organizations. The tandems are jointly implementing projects on “Local Community Development” and the culture of the democratic dialogue.

Another peacebuilding project is called the “Habit of Thinking”. It is a series of seminars aimed at getting acquainted with the theory and practice of developing critical thinking together with facilitators from Ukraine and Russia; developing/adapting and testing methods for the development of critical thinking educational activities. The project offers an opportunity to be included in the context of Ukrainian-Russian relations on a personal level, to get acquainted with people who work on critical thinking in their communities, to form one’s own opinion about the social processes in both countries, and to gain experience of interaction in a Ukrainian-Russian group of participants.