During the ISV I learned that challenges are international. Before, I was a little scared of challenges, I had the mindset that if the things go not according to the plan the desired impact cannot be achieved and the project is unsuccessful. The discussions with participants from the other countries let me understand that they also go through the similar challenges with their projects and it is just a part of the process. Realization of this encouraged me to try more than one approach to one issue.
The ISV made me overthink many aspects of my social activity. Working as a team, in my community, we have always tried to improve our events, but mostly we analyzed them from the standpoint of organizers and based the changes on what we thought should be changed. I realized that we have actually never focused on the feedback, which limited the impact of the projects to the certain extend. I met participants from the other countries who have been working or volunteering in the Social Sector for a while and in their stories, they emphasized the stages of planning and receiving feedback. It made me re-evaluate my actions on those stages and I realized they were not sufficient. Since December, our team has been working on establishing better connections with the target audience and participants, analyzing their feedback and using it to improve the events.
It is not always true for all the projects, but in most cases when you do things for the community the more its members are involved the more effective the project it. The ISV opened new possibilities in terms of connections and cooperation. During the ISV I met people who implemented similar projects in their community or worked on the topic that I was always interested in but never knew how to approach. As a result, I planned a few new ideas for the projects based on the experiences and advice of other Active Citizens. ISV gave me a chance to built bridges with more Active Citizens not only from the other countries but also from Ukraine, which allows us to make an input to each other projects.
