My name is Marharyta. I am 17 years old. I am from the Kyiv region, the town of Bila Tserkva, but I have spent almost half my life in the village Shkarivka.

Throughout my childhood, Shkarivka was a place where you could come to your grandmother’s house for aromatic borsch and run around the stadium with your friends. Later, it became associated with the daily commute to school and getting up at 5:40.

However, after February 24, I started to associate it with the only quiet and safe place where my anxiety did not get to me. When explosions happened in the nearby town of Bila Tserkva, to be located in Shkarivka was less dangerous. I understood that this place is too precious for me to close my eyes on the real problems of the local community.

Shkarivka paused almost everything it had since the start of the invasion: entertainment programs at the club, children’s sports activities, and even the school, which was almost the only place for socialization in the village, stopped functioning for about 2 months. That is why my team at the UActive program decided to take responsibility for restoring what our local community deserved.

Our team worked on the project of informal space “Without age” (“Bez viku” in Ukrainian). The idea was to create a safe space in the shelter where children could study and participate in extracurricular activities, such as various training sessions, cultural and entertainment events, and even mental health support activities. We secured funding from the partners of the UActive program to bring this project to life. The space is now open and hosts a range of planned activities, but its primary use has become a shelter for schoolchildren and community members.

However, the UActive program is not only about the process of creating a project and implementing it, it is about the hundreds of individuals who grow from this experience. For me, UActive became an additional lever that significantly influenced my admission to the university.

For the past year, I have been dreaming about the opportunity to study at the Kyiv School of Economics. But I failed to score enough points on the test to enter on a budget, so my priority was a grant competition, the condition of which was to write about my experience and to be interviewed by the grant committee. Then I faced a dilemma: “What makes me different from other applicants? What do I have to show?” The solution to this was the certificate from the program that was lying next to me. Finally, having successfully passed all the stages of the competitive selection process, I managed to get my grant. And today I am studying law as an official student of KSE and looking back, I realize how much experience at UActive has given me.