47 Communities Join a New Ecosystem for Project Development

The latest Project Navigator webinar brought together 52 participants, including 47 representatives of territorial communities across Ukraine.

Project Navigator has selected seven communities for the evaluation of project ideas:

• Malovyskivska Community - Kirovohrad Oblast;

• Kornynska Community - Rivne Oblast;

• Teterivska Community - Zhytomyr Oblast;

• Demydivska Community - Rivne Oblast;

• Hostomel Community - Kyiv Oblast;

• Katlabuzka Community - Odesa Oblast;

• Petropavlivska Community - Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.

At the start of the meeting, special attention was given to motivating community professionals who work every day to attract resources for the recovery and development of their territories.

Ukraine is currently undergoing important changes in public administration. The state is placing increasing emphasis on results, efficiency, and the quality of work performed by professionals who drive reform implementation and territorial development. In this context, community managers responsible for strategic planning, project preparation, and work with government programmes, international donors, and investors play an especially important role. A recently adopted law provides for the following opportunities:

• Communities can provide additional payments to employees for extra work related to international assistance.

• Additional payments may be financed from local budgets or through grants from international partners.

• This makes project management roles financially more attractive and enables staff to legally receive bonuses for funds brought into their communities.

https://www.rada.gov.ua/news/news_kom/273784.html

For this reason, Project Navigator is not being created as another information system or database.

Its main goal is to become a practical tool for people who work every day to attract financial resources for their communities.

We believe that a modern community needs strategies, plans, and effective tools to put them into action. That is why Project Navigator is evolving into a comprehensive ecosystem that supports communities from strategic planning through project preparation and funding mobilisation.

During the webinar, participants learned about the platform’s capabilities for creating electronic community profiles, preparing project portfolios, analysing project ideas, and working in the context of public investment management reform.

Participants showed particular interest in the platform’s potential for preparing local waste management plans, municipal energy plans, environmental security and climate change adaptation strategies (ESCCAS), and the related portfolios of public investment projects.

For the Project Navigator team, the most important outcome was the communities’ readiness to use the platform and help develop it further.

Communities are becoming co-developers of the new ecosystem.

Community managers, development specialists, energy managers, and staff of economic development and international cooperation departments are best placed to understand which tools are needed for day-to-day work. Their feedback and practical experience will therefore underpin further improvements to the platform’s functionality.

The next stages of Project Navigator development will focus on creating a more comfortable working environment for users, automating routine processes, preparing project portfolios, identifying funding sources, and supporting communities at every stage of project implementation.

We are grateful to every community that has already joined this work.

Together, we are building a digital platform and a new system of support for communities, where strategy becomes a project, a project becomes an investment, and an investment brings tangible change to community residents.

“Project Navigator is created by community managers, for community managers.”