Two years ago, I was a young mother staying at home caring for my baby. I had just moved from Ukraine’s capital region (Kyiv) to Novoarkhangelsk, a small municipality in eastern Ukraine. I’ve always been an active person, so I couldn’t just stay at home. I decided to take a course about how to actively participate in your city. The course eventually led me to my seat on the council, where I happily work today improving the relationship between local government and its people.
When I first started, the government was communicating with residents through paper newspapers and leaflets. One of my first goals was to work towards digitizing government communication and services. Digitalization had begun in Ukraine a few years ago, but for rural residents, this concept was something foreign and incomprehensible. Like the rest of the world, we have faced the problem of quarantine restrictions, which has significantly reduced the ability of local governments to communicate freely with the public. We realized it was time to look for a solution.
In June 2021, we began leveraging our Facebook page for the village more consistently. In just two-three months, we managed to gather an audience of about 3,000 people, an impressive feat in a community with a population of only 13,000. The page quickly gained popularity, but it also lost its audience quickly. While we had good intentions, we lacked the communications skills and expertise to effectively manage the platform. Due to our small budget, it was impractical to hire a communications specialist to manage the platform. This inspired some of our team members to start training on the Diia.Digital Education, a free national platform that teaches media literacy, digital journalism, and the basics of IT.
This was the beginning of a new stage of communication between the Novoarkhangelsk Village Council local governments and the public. We started implementing tools like Google Forms and Miro and gradually people became accustomed to using them. We saw the first results of cooperation between the government and the public while writing the 2030 development strategy of the Novoarkhangelsk territorial community at the end of 2021. Residents of the community actively participated in the discussion of urgent issues and joined survey groups.
Of course there were problems. While younger residents were excited to engage in a digital way, the older population had a steeper learning curve. To address this, the Novoarkhangelsk Village Council recorded online step-by-step instructions for filling out the questionnaire. We had a positive result because caring community members were able to take the survey, even if they had no previous experience with these tools.
In February 2022, our work was interrupted as Russia invaded my beloved country and declared war. Now, instead of planning for 2030, we have redirected our focus to the urgent needs of our community and the now more than 1,600 internally displaced Ukrainians who are now living in Novoarkhangelsk. Online communication reached a new level of importance. Thanks to communication between the authorities and the community, dozens of problematic issues are solved every day. We can easily gather humanitarian requests, coordinate volunteers, and connect with national and regional organizations to gather supplies the community needs. We began to use Telegram to disseminate short news with the most important and necessary information. We’ve explored new ways to connect with the community, like interviewing our newest residents coming from places hit hard by the war. It’s not all about blood and death, but about their new lives here. One woman who came from Kharkiv shared how she started an ecological project to collect trash from rivers. It’s these stories of resilience that give me hope for Ukraine. And through digitalization, we can continue to open up our government and improve the lives of our people.
