In 2018, the ICC team designed an Intercultural Citizenship Test aiming to assess citizens’
knowledge and awareness on human rights, their intercultural competences, their perception of diversity as an advantage, as well as their willingness to act in an intercultural way. Following recommendations of the ICC Global coordinators’ meeting in September 2018, members of Ukrainian ICC network expressed strong interest in piloting the ICC Citizenship Test.

It is in the atmosphere of well-coordinated teamwork that the whole initiative unrolled. In October 2018, all ICC-UA cities under the guidance of the national coordinator focused on customizing the Test to their specific environments. After a few of face-to-face meetings and on-line consultations, the decision was made to agree on one common Test content (introducing differences only on one to tree test questions relevant e.g. to cultural heritage, which is unique in every city) and to pre-test it in Ukrainian with a few representatives from different ICC-UA members.

As a result, the final version of the Test was approved in November 2018 and made available on-line across all six ICC-UA cities: Lutsk, Melitopol, Odessa, Pavlograd, Sumy and Vinnytsia. The cities made official public announcements and introduced the initiative on their official websites, Facebook pages, shared the Test link on different social medias. In addition, paper version of the Test was distributed, e.g. in educational institutions, intercultural hubs/clubs, among national minority groups/associations during public events or initiatives such as focus groups or other thematic meetings.

Within the period of two months more than 2000 people across Ukraine answered the Intercultural Citizenship Test. The cities made a particular effort to assure gender representation, as well as age, cultural and religious diversity of their respondents. General opinion about the ICC Citizenship Test in ICC-Ukraine is that the tool is well built, very user friendly and appears to be easy to answer, yet, it makes respondents to think frankly about their own situations in their own cities and to answer the questions that they do not necessarily think of in their day-to-day life.

Individual cities’ analyses show that between 41-48 %of respondents in Ukrainian cities believe that diverse professional teams (in terms of ethnic background, religion, language, gender, age) can contribute with more perspectives to any discussion; and more than 30% of respondents in such cities as Lutsk, Odessa and Vinnytsia agree that diverse teams are more creative. Only 16-17 % of respondents in these cities believe that diverse teams cannot share the same values.

Regardless the number of nationalities cohabiting in Ukrainian cities, the majority of people who answered the Test, estimated that the number of languages spoken in their city is not higher than 3.

The majority of respondents across all cities said they would not be disturbed their neighbors spoke a different language, were of different religious believes, or were refugees or Romas. The opinions are divided on the question about having the same-sex couple as neighbors. There is also a tendency of respondents from larger ICC-Ukraine cities to believe that there are too many migrants in their cities, while the residents of smaller ICC-UA members have opposite opinion. Of course, more focused analysis of the ICC-Ukraine member cities’ provided data may yield even more interesting results and useful conclusions for the further development of the tool.

Some of the cities – such as Lutsk and Pavlograd – have recorded some feedback videos in English and Ukrainian, others – Melitopol, for instance – collected it in the form of social media comments.