How the community sees intercultural Vinnytsia in the nearest future, where all residents would feel fully integrated to the city’s life regardless their origins, provenance or status? This was the key question the participants to the 3rd Task Force Meeting tried to answer when defining strategic vision of their city for the years to come.

The city of Vinnytsia takes the task of its ICC Strategy Development very seriously.

Following the ICC proposed methodology - as proposed by the ICC expert Kseniya Rubicondo and shared with all ICC-UA members in a specific training (Pavlograd, 2018), - and under the guidance of national ICC-UA coordinator, the city of Vinnytsia has accomplished tremendous amount of work within and beyond its Task Force meetings to, among other things: i) review and understand its ICC Index results and recommendations; ii) carry out ICC adapted SWOT/TOWS analyses (as per ICC methodology); iii) conduct relevant surveys, define their priorities. As part of this work, the ICC moto of the city – “Vinnytsia - diversity unites" – was also adopted by the meeting’s participants.

The discussion of the strategic priorities for the intercultural development of the city focused on four main pillars identified within the previous Task Force meetings: Interaction and Integration, Education and Safety. New facets and/or alternatives to these priorities were considered in order to integrate strengths (e.g. development of SMEs sector) as well as weaknesses of the city (media from ICC point of view) into the strategy. Yurii Woitsitsky, a local expert in charge for the ICC Strategy Development, presented an outline of the document resulting from the previous Task Force meetings. He also listed relevant SWOT factors and analytical conclusions resulting from the previous TF meetings, and provided an example of how to create an outline of a concrete project/initiative under the ICC strategy paying attention the project’s key audience, key indicators and to its sources of funding.

According to the ICC Strategy Development methodology, Vinnytsia has to still integrate into its strategy one element - the results of the ICC Citizenship Test of its residents. Hence, the second part of the meeting was devoted to the review and adjustment, question by question, of the content of the ICC Citizenship Test (as developed by the CoE) to the ICC-UA cities. This was done in collaboration with two other ICC-UA cities members – Odessa and Lutsk – taking part in the meeting physically and virtually. At the time of this report preparation, the cities of Lutsk and Odessa have already launched their pilot versions of the ICC Citizenship Test accompanied by the official messages from their respective City Halls that introduced the Test to their communities and invited people to provide their feedback

It should be noted that regardless the stage of their ICC Strategy Development, all ICC-UA cities agreed to become pilot cities for ‘testing’ the ICC Citizenship Test (following the ICC Global coordinators’ meeting/agreement in Rijeka).

On December 20, the city of Vinnytsia is planning its last Task Force meeting this year in order to finalise their ICC Strategy draft and submit it to the City Council. The Council will consider the strategy for adoption in January 2019. Following the adoption, the city aims to hold a special forum devoted to the ICC Strategy development with participation of all the ICC-UA Network members and other Ukrainian cities in order to share Vinnytsia’s experience and lessons learned. This would provide wider visibility to the ICC initiatives in Ukraine and broaden the circle of its supporters. As a national coordinator, I would seek the support of the ICC Programme Secretariat for this event.