Kseniia Choni ’07 (Kyiv, Ukraine)
2013 FLEX Alumni Grants
Project Location: Shchelkino, Crimea Ukraine
$1500 in FLEX Alumni Grant Program Funding
Summary: Ksenia Choni ’07 organized the second-annual Sustainability Summit – an open project laboratory for sustainable initiatives and designs for communities and towns on September 13-16. Economists, ecologists, energy experts, and social innovators worked together to achieve the goal of creating and testing collective project models for the economic, ecological, and social growth of participants’ communities. The event included sessions on sustainable energy and city as well as community development. The event took place in an open-air setting, powered by solar panels and megawatts of smiles and brilliant ideas from young people eager to create sustainable models for their communities’ development. Sixty-nine attendees of the summit participated from diverse backgrounds and communities. At the event, Kateryna Zhupanova ’09 presented the Help and Travel project, which promotes grassroots community involvement and spoke about her knowledge on sustainability.
Partner Organizations: Greencubator; The Association of Ukrainian; Rishennya Ye!, an American Exchange Program Alumni Association
Project Results:
- Upon completion of the project the Sustainability Summit team shared the results of the summit with teachers and schools in their community and provided the teachers with educational materials and books to share with students information about sustainability and its development. The project summary and more information can be found here.
- Those in attendance also supported the SHELTER+ fundraising campaign by buying a solid fuel boiler for the cultural and civic center in Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine.
- Sustainability Summit speaker Zachary Shahan, director of CleanTechnica, the most popular cleantech-focused website in the world and Planetsave, a world-leading green and science news site, published several articles about his visit to Ukraine, highlighting Ukrainian clean technologies to the world (http://cleantechnica.com/?s=ukraine)
