A born leader is easy to spot even as a child: they are always in the limelight and seem to get more and more confident with each passing day. However, even if a child lacks inborn leadership skills, they can learn the art of being number one. For the recent four years, several hundred Ukrainian children from various parts of Ukraine attended a kind of “leadership school” within Dreams + Teams project, sponsored and implemented by the British Council in Ukraine.
The students were trained by British instructors, who told their students about VIP etiquette rules, taught them to give interviews to the press, and organize sports festivals and fairs, taking into account people with special needs.
Among the participants were both ordinary schools and schools for disabled children, boarding schools for parentless children, and institutions for juvenile delinquents. In the four years that the project was in operation, more than 230 children and 6,000 local community members from five Ukrainian cities (Kyiv, Odesa, Lviv, Kharkiv, and Melitopol) took part in its activities.
It pays to tell of one’s own victories – this is what the future leaders learned from their British instructors during the project, and now they applied this advice in practice. The end of the program was marked with an action Art Has No Limits. The exhibits and festivals allowed children to demonstrate their creativity and share the experience of their success in their home cities.
At the opening of the action,
Lee Turner, Ambassador of Great Britain to Ukraine, noted that all the “participants were born after 1991. These are the people who will become Ukrainian leaders in several years. So, leadership skills are of crucial importance not only for kids, but also for the entire nation which they are going to change.”
According to Natalia Vasyliuk, deputy director for projects, British Council, Dreams + Teams does have things to be proud of. For example, in Odessa the participants masterminded a charity fair, collected a certain sum, and purchased linoleum for one of the local schools. Afterwards its headmaster could not help amazement, for children rendering material aid to adults are indeed on the exotic side.
Project leaders can go on endlessly recounting their students’ victories. What they consider their main achievement is the kids’ ability to change their worldview and improve their way of living. Vasyliuk also said that the cooperation between students from ordinary schools and inmates of the institutions for delinquents brought forth good fruit: the more “problem-free” children helped in the socialization of the inmates and orphaned children from specialized boarding schools.
