Interaction among grassroots organizations promotes the development of an integrated society. This is the bottom line of the Fourth International Conference titled “Cooperation between Ukrainian and German Organizations: Paths toward a Coordinated Dialog,” recently hosted in Kyiv by the Ukrainian Bureau of the Friedrich Ebert Fund and the German-Ukrainian Forum. The conference gathered 150 representatives of German and Ukrainian nongovernmental organizations. One of the representatives of the German NGOs, Klaus Oberlander of the German-Ukrainian Forum, recalled that three years ago the first conference of Ukrainian and German NGOs in Hamburg drew only thirty-five participants. Meanwhile, in May of last year representatives of nearly 160 NGOs attended the third forum in Heidelberg, Germany. More than 200 German and Ukrainian partner grassroots organizations specialize, among other things, in providing and distributing humanitarian aid, offering student and cultural exchange programs, helping victims of human trafficking to return home, and organizing therapeutic recreation for Ukrainian children and language courses. Mr. Oberlander believes the German public now has more objective information about Ukraine owing to the development of such partnerships.
This cooperation should be also viewed within the context of an enlarging European Union, which now shares a border with Ukraine. After all, there could hardly be a better intermediary in the process of Ukraine’s integration with the European community than the structures of a civil society. Helmut Kurt, director of the Friedrich Ebert Fund Regional Bureau for Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova, is convinced that although the prospects for interaction among nongovernmental organizations are not directly dependent on politicians, the latter must view them as a powerful tool for developing civil societies and bringing them closer together. “Our cooperation is a form of politics that evolves at the grassroots level,” Maria von Pawelsz-Wolf, a representative of the Union of Partnership Ties Wiesbaden-Schierstein-Kamyanets-Podilsky, said, addressing the conference. “The deeper such cooperation of Ukraine with EU countries, the sooner Ukraine will become a full resident of the European home,” she said. Speaking at the forum’s opening, People’s Deputy Vasyl Onopenko, who co-chairs the parliamentary group of deputies for interparliamentary ties with Germany, said: “Interesting processes are underway in Ukraine, which are laying the foundations for a civil society in our country...We have a Constitution, Civil Code, etc. However, appropriate laws alone will not suffice to build a civil society. The public should be also consolidated to this end. German funds and organizations with which Ukrainian nongovernmental structures maintain contacts are giving us great support in the process of such consolidation.”
Much like during all the previous conferences, the participants of this fourth conference focused on the results of their cooperation and ways to achieve more intensive interaction in the future. As for existing problems, the discussants said much the same that was heard during the previous forum in Heidelberg, complaining, e.g., about inadequate laws, red tape, etc. Notably, complaints came from both Germans and Ukrainians. In a striking case, Liubov Zysko, chair of Circle of Friends — Simferopol- Heidelberg, a Simferopol-based association, was forced to reject medicines sent as humanitarian aid because she could not clear a batch of antibiotics through customs for half a year, during which they expired, and she had to pay to have them destroyed and notify her German partners about this. The same fate awaited a batch of insulin, but Ms. Zysko managed to have it cleared at the eleventh hour. It’s worth noting that the representative of the Circle of Friends — Simferopol-Heidelberg did not so much complain as share her experience of running social programs, one of which is a program to assist former Nazi concentration camp inmates. The German partners of Circle of Friends consider the experience of this association an example worth following and repeating elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Incidentally, this project involves nineteen- and twenty-year-old German volunteers, who preferred social work to military service in their homeland.
The fourth forum continued the discussion of the need for change in the partnership between German and Ukrainian NGOs. Aside from such traditional forms of cooperation as collecting, transferring, and dispensing humanitarian aid, other forms are becoming popular today, such as supporting Ukrainian manufacturers and Ukrainian markets, encouraging the development of entrepreneurship in Ukraine, creating new jobs, as well as myriad educational projects. Maria von Pawelsz-Wolf provided a graphic example: “Ten years ago we helped one person buy a printing press. Today his private enterprise employs forty workers who are producing printed matter for the Kyiv State University, among others.”
Summing up their discussion, conference participants agreed on the need for a center that would offer complete information on the activities of Ukrainian and German NGO partners, coordinate their cooperation, and establish contacts with parliaments and governments.
