Name of the organization/initiative and year of foundation

Donbas Dialogue Platform was founded in 2014.

Mission

Setting up and maintenance of a productive process of interaction and recovery in local communities of the [Donbas] region by offering a platform for a dialogue between the residents of the liberated areas and cities, people who reside in the territories in war conditions, internally displaced persons (IDPs) and all other residents of Ukraine.

Actions and projects in the context of armed conflict

The Platform’s primary activity is convening the dialogue marathons two times per year. Donbas Dialogue uses crowdsourcing technologies to identify problems and issues from as many positions as possible. The ability to connect anonymously to the online dialogue provides inclusiveness to persons who would be have been otherwise excluded from the process. Experts, dialogue facilitators, and civil society representatives from the controlled and non-controlled territories of Ukraine, and foreign experts take part in the marathons.

Since 2014, the Donbas Dialogue Platform has held eight dialogue marathons on the following topics: ‘Emergence from the military conflict and work with its consequences’, ‘Ways and means of emergence from an armed conflict’, ‘Narrative and conflict’, ‘How the Donbas Dialogue Platform is seen from outside’, ‘In the aftermath of war’, ‘The role of civil society in overcoming the consequences of the armed conflict in Ukraine,’ ‘The future Donbas image.’ Reports on the results of the marathons are published on the organization’s website. In 2018-2020, dialogue and related activities were supported by the United Nations Development Program.

Connected to the dialogue is the activity on the professional training of facilitators for a specific task – facilitation of the online dialogues. In 2018-2019, a trainer from Balkans Goran Lojancic joined the project by conducting a series of training, with support from the British organization “Initiatives for Change” and the British government.