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04.12.2024
“Integration into the EU is a long road. You need to have a good pair of shoes,” Jochen Richter at the Lviv Municipal Partnership Forum
The Second Annual Lviv Municipal Partnership Forum is taking place on November 25-26. This year’s event brings together more than 140 participants, including communities, diplomats, and representatives of international organizations from 6 countries – Ukraine, Sweden, Germany, France, Austria, and the United States.
The forum was opened by Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovyi, Deputy Minister of Community and Territorial Development Oleksiy Ryabykin, and Head of Lviv Regional Administration Maksym Kozytskyi.
“Today, Ukraine is in the top and the entire democratic world is helping us to survive as a full-fledged and strong state. We are grateful to all our partners for this. But we must realize that this assistance will sooner or later cease to be unconditional. Because every country has many internal problems of its own. Therefore, we need to have competent specialists who can write grants, convince and engage partners,” Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovyi emphasized at the beginning of the meeting.
The Lviv Municipal Partnership Forum began with an opening talk by Professor Jochen Richter, who has over 30 years of experience at the European Commission. He shared his views on the importance of the EU’s fundamental values for Ukraine’s integration:
“Integration into the EU is a long road. You have to have a good pair of shoes, you have to have a snack, and after a while people start asking the question “How much longer?”. Many difficult decisions will have to be made along the way. In all the countries that joined the EU, people’s support for this process naturally became less and less along the way.”
“Your common task is to transform EU values into national law, understand their essence and find ways to adapt to new realities. After all, what worked before may require a completely different approach after the European integration process. The key to success is communication, communication and communication again: in Brussels, in your country, between partners and communities,” says Jochen Richter.
This year’s forum is the result of a seven-month program, the Academy of Project Management and International Cooperation, supported by the USAID Ukraine Confidence Building Initiative (UCBI). During the program, 15 communities from all over Ukraine, together with experienced mentors, wrote real projects, found international partners, had study tours to Ukrainian cities, and received development scholarships.
“In this project, 15 Ukrainian communities have truly reached a new level of international cooperation. We saw that the approach of a city that is strong in international cooperation being a mentor for someone who wants to grow really works. For example, Lviv was a mentor for Nikopol: the community developed its own portfolio of key projects, and the Lviv City Institute helped establish international relations for virtually every one of them,” comments Marta Suprun, Cities4Cities advocacy expert.
Among the forum participants was Tony Ring, chairman of the municipal council of the Swedish city of Karlskuga, who visited his partner in Shepetivka before the forum.
One of the news from the Forum is that Cities4Cities is stepping up its partnerships with U.S. municipalities. “A Peace Corps volunteer joined our work, 5 strong communities recently traveled to the United States under the Open World program, Americans who support Ukraine work with us, and we keep in touch with Ukrainians who live there. In December, we will learn about new agreements between Ukraine and the United States,” says Svitlana Blinova, coordinator of the Cities4Cities initiative.
The Lviv Municipal Partnership Forum is a platform for strengthening existing partnerships and creating new ones that will contribute to the restoration of Ukrainian communities and their development.
Additionally:
The Lviv Municipal Partnership Forum is an annual international event organized by the Cities4Cities | United4Ukraine initiative and the Lviv City Council to promote the idea of inter-municipal cooperation between Ukrainian and international communities.
The forum is organized with the support of the USAID Ukraine Confidence Building Initiative (UCBI) and the Swedish-Ukrainian Polaris Program “Support to Multi-Level Governance in Ukraine” implemented by SALAR International.