December’s Awesome Ottawa award goes to Mykola Apetyk and Sofia Zhestokova, both young people living in Lviv, Ukraine, to support their efforts to help other young people turn ideas into reality.
Mykola Apetyk and Sofia Zhestokova. Photo: Awesome Ottawa.
“Because of the war in Ukraine,” explains Mykola, “many young people were forced to move to safer regions of the country. Because of this, many young people in my city do not know what to do. Why does this happen? I am convinced they have many ideas but lack the knowledge and resources to implement them. It is injustice, so our idea is to organize training for young people about project management and how to implement their own ideas.”
“One of the biggest problems of young people,” Sofia adds, “is that they have really great ideas but don’t have—or think they don’t have—enough knowledge and resources to implement them.”
Mykola and Sofia’s “From Idea to Implementation School” will tackle this problem, giving opportunities for youth to learn more about project management, leadership, and team management.
“We expect the participants to come up with ideas for their own projects,” explains Mykola, “or to develop already existing ones so they can implement them later—and of course it is also in our plan to continue supporting and helping them with implementation of their projects after our training is over.”
Mykola is a 22-year-old public sector project manager and a mentor for young people. When he is not helping others with their projects, he plays chess, runs competitively, and watches football. Sofia is a 17-year-old university student in public administration who returned to Ukraine in August 2022 after studying for a year in Kansas.
Awesome Ottawa is part of a global movement of self-organizing chapters forwarding the interest of awesome in the universe, $1,000 at a time. At each chapter, ten or so “trustees” each contribute $100 every month and review short applications received online to decide on the recipient of the pooled funds—usually a local project, but occasionally a particularly awesome one far away from home. Globally, more than $6 million has already been awarded—$159,000 of that by Awesome Ottawa. For more information, visit awesomeottawa.ca.
