03
Jul
#EaPFellows / Oleksii Marushchak: "The time is never right”
To save. To support. To promote. With these three ideas in mind Oleksii Marushchak, a junior researcher at the Schmalhausen Institute of Zoology of National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and a co-founder of the Ukrainian Nature Conservation Group, applied for the EaP Civil Society Fellowship in spring 2023. “My main motivation is to help
I know I have to apply my skills before I am satisfied with my knowledge. The Eastern Partnership Civil Society Fellowship was a chance for me to believe in my visions and be the changemaker. I gained the most valuable qualities as a student: leadership and emotional intelligence that will make me competitive in my future initiatives
A year ago, I could hardly fathom the successes that I have accomplished today. One year ago, I joined the EaP Civil Society Fellowship initiative... It was a long journey, but along the way, I have continuously met people who helped me develop my skills, push me to always do a better job, and to never step back. Thші Fellowship was a unique opportunity for me and helped me to be confident and experience a great amount of personal growth as well as to help develop my community and gain valuable experience for my future.
It was a unique experience with exciting challenges. We had to create the MVP in 3 days, having nothing but an idea. We’ve developed our ToR by day 2 and… started working non-stop! We had the job done 10 minutes before the final presentation. Hope we'll launch it soon. {...} Many thanks to the Eastern Partnership Civil Society Facility’s team for such a large event! It was a wonderful, unforgettable, and warm atmosphere. Let there be more hackathons, understanding and cooperation in this world.
After all, we’ve come back to Ukraine with flags flying! Our project Library for you has become one of the four winners at the 2018 EaP Civil Society Hackathon. But this is not only our team’s victory, but of all Ukrainian libraries and their users! Ahead is an incredible piece of work that will require a large and strong team, lots of energy, support and inspiration... I’d like to say thank you to all participants, mentors and organizers! I felt your support all these three days!
Such events are very interesting, because it’s here where we find not only like-minded people, but also good mentors – those people who have already gone through all of those things and have a lot of experience to share. With such strong mentors, we have rethought and reworked a lot in our Help Invest project and can now make both technical and ideological changes in our project.
The hackathon has really become a major breakthrough for me in the development of a new project – I had an idea, but lacked knowledge to develop an ICT tool. Now, thanks to the hackathon, I understand what to do and, thanks to our mentors, I’ve expanded the boundaries of my current knowledge.
Another unique feature of this hackathon is that it brings together teams from the EaP countries and gives you a good opportunity to see what solutions work in other countries. Here, it’s technically possible to take someone's idea and implement it in your country – an added value of such networking of people from the EaP countries.