Following the opening ceremony, the participants representing sister cities of the two countries began work in 18 joint focus groups. Each round table brought together young people from one Russian and one German city, which became sister cities in different years. Krasnodar citizens worked together with friends and colleagues from the sister city of Karlsruhe.
"During the Forum young people from Russia and Germany discuss the opportunities of implementing joint projects in a variety of fields — from culture, sports, education to business. The meaning and reason for this work is the strengthening of twinning links between partner cities of the Russian Federation and Germany. In the future, with carefully thought-through projects, young people will be able to contact their municipalities in order to obtain support for implementation of the projects," told the seminar leader, the trainer for international youth projects of Savchuk and Partners Company (Germany), Sergey Savchuk.
The event took place in the classrooms of Kuban State Technological University. The focus group work included several steps. On the first step, participants got acquainted with each other, with color markers painted and signed each other's portraits and exchanged them. Further they shared their ideas about which bilateral projects they wanted to implement. Everybody who wished could make suggestions and invent topics, and then the participants in the round tables selected the most important and interesting ones.
In addition, today young people attended a master class on the subject "How to visualize projects and prepare their presentations".
Tomorrow there will be the next step of the discussion — the focus group participants will begin to elaborate on the selected projects and determine the resources needed to implement them.
For example, members of the focus group of the sister cities Irkutsk and Pforzheim are discussing a project to create a German-Russian Friendship garden square in the Russian city. The representatives of Arkhangelsk and Emden are going to create a joint youth Internet site, young people from Krasnodar and Karlsruhe have proposed to build on the already established practice of joint music concerts of the collectives from the two cities and to organize an annual music festival with broad international representation.
Julia Kritskaia, a member of Krasnodar thematic table, also proposed to develop an Internet platform for informal youth projects. One of these could be a project of a joint permanent photo exhibition, which would film Krasnodar and Karlsruhe "with no retouching".
A representative of the Youth Parliament of Krasnodar Victoria Garkusha voiced the idea of organizing an international sports festival which would include competitions on the courtyard sports and workout. Another Krasnodar member of the focus group, Evgeny Chistyakov proposed to realize the idea of a summer international camp to hold there international cognitive quests.
"Such events are also interesting because they help the young people of the two countries to understand each other better, despite linguistic and cultural differences. I hope my projects will be supported and developed during this forum," said the painter and designer from Berlin Christian Ridder.
Helen Kozlova, born in Kazakhstan and now living in Cologne, said that in Krasnodar, the city where a great attention is paid for landscaping and planting of greenery she hope her ideas in landscape gardening would be supported. The ideas could be implemented with participation of representatives of the sister cities of Russia and Germany.
According to the organizers, the Youth Forum will continue tomorrow. There is one more day to discuss the projects, visualize them and work out the details.
Read the news of Krasnodar in our channel Telegram
