As summer drew to a close, twenty-one youth workers from Ukraine, Hungary, Georgia, Slovakia, and Poland came together in Rzeszów for a week that challenged everything they thought they knew about the community.
The programme opened with a deceptively simple question: "What is a community?" What followed was anything but simple. With participants bringing entirely different cultural backgrounds, social realities, and lived experiences into the room, the conversation quickly became something richer and more layered than any single answer could contain. That was exactly the point.
The week was built around genuine collaboration, both as a theme and as a method. INPRO partnered with four organisations across the participating countries to make it happen: Uzhhorod National University from Ukraine, Mustárház IITI from Hungary, Umbrella from Georgia, and Youthfully Yours SK from Slovakia. Together, participants dug into the structures that already exist in their communities, mapped out the needs and gaps, and worked toward a shared vision of what truly inclusive communities could look like. They didn't just talk in the abstract either. They defined their own community, set its priorities, and came up with concrete strategies they could take back and actually use in their cities.
Running through everything was one core idea: inclusivity starts with genuinely understanding difference, not tolerating it, not working around it, but recognising it as a source of strength. The participants came in with different frameworks for what community means and left with a deeper appreciation for why those differences matter.
Tomiris, one of the participants, put it simply: she couldn't have imagined a better way to end the summer.
Communities are more than geography. They are relationships, shared values, and collective ambition. When people choose to understand each other across those differences rather than retreat from them, something shifts. That shift is what this programme was about.
Partners:
Uzhhorod National University - Ukraine
Mustárház IITI - Hungary
Umbrella - Georgia
Youthfully Yours SK - Slovakia
INPRO - Poland
