A note from the 2023 team:
A historic event that inspired the direction of this year’s project was the fact that in 2022, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy officially applied for Ukrainian EU membership. With many Ukrainians already living in the EU, it became the driving force behind our project. We realised that before any action on the question of membership is being taken, both EU citizens and Ukrainians need to answer what the EU and being European mean to them. Only when we know the answer to these questions can we begin to work on the future.
Therefore, we passed these questions on to the people, and the goal of making those voices heard culminated in one of our main activities: Our survey about the experience of Ukrainians living in the EU.
Furthermore, our activities included four offline discussions and four online workshops, bringing together as many participants as possible regardless of their background or their age.
We started with the offline tour at the beginning of June, visiting Cologne Pride first, and then made our way to Saxony, where we had stops in Leipzig, Chemnitz, and Görlitz. There, we conducted discussions on the main topics of this year’s project. All of the talks took place in the Europe Dome, a wooden cupola that aims to create a safe space for people to share their (political) opinions and come up with new ideas together.
For the four online events in September, our primary focus, however, lay on the participation of young people starting at the age of 16. As young people are quite literally the future, our goal was to provide them with education on the topics that are important to them. With the valuable input of our experts, our participants explored the issues of civic participation, women's rights, the integration of Ukraine into the EU, and the environmental consequences of the war. However, it was just as essential for us to listen to what they have to say, connect their opinions, and share some tools with them on how they can take action to shape the future and promote civic participation.
More info on the Ukrainian Vibes project and the Catalogue of Ideas including citizens' suggestions for the future of Europe here.
