Ministry for Communities, Territories and Internally Displaced Persons to launch its first Office to train 1,000 project managers for local communities, said Vitalii Bezhin at the Carpathian Summit

On the initiative of the Ministry for Communities, Territories and Internally Displaced Persons of Ukraine, the first Cohesion Policy Office will be established in Ivano-Frankivsk. This was announced by Minister for Communities, Territories and Internally Displaced Persons Vitalii Bezhin at the Carpathian Summit. The Office will serve as a training hub for project managers who will help communities develop and implement investment projects. It is here that the Ministry's initiative to train 1,000 project managers for local communities will be launched.

"More and more European programmes and funding opportunities are opening up for communities today. But there is a great deal of work between a good idea and a completed project. We need specialists who can navigate the entire process — identifying a community's needs, preparing a concept and budget, carrying out procurement, and managing implementation and reporting. Our goal is to train 1,000 project managers who will have these skills and be able to work directly in the interests of their communities," said Vitalii Bezhin.

The training will be built around hands-on, practical work. Community representatives will bring their own real-life projects and spend five days working on them together with experts.

Once the training is complete, communities will not be left to manage their projects alone. Ongoing mentoring and technical support will follow, including expert consultations, help with preparing applications, project refinement, and the development of a regional portfolio of investment projects.

In this way, the Office is designed to help communities work through every practical stage of project preparation and improve their chances of securing funding and successfully implementing their projects.

The first Cohesion Policy Office will open in Ivano-Frankivsk. The programme manager for the initiative will be Ihor Popadiuk, a well-known figure in local government circles with extensive practical experience in project and regional development work. Ivano-Frankivsk has experience implementing international projects, an established project team, and ready-made sites that can be used as practical case studies during the training.

The Office's work will also make it possible to systematically identify the challenges communities face when preparing and implementing projects. The Ministry will use this experience to improve state tools for supporting communities and regional policy.

The goal of the initiative is to build a system in which communities have trained specialists, access to expertise, and support for preparing high-quality quality investment projects.