GoGlobal’s quarterly newsletter January-March 2023

The GoGlobal Speaking Club is an in-house project, which is really meaningful to all of us because it’s a throwback to our very beginning, to promoting English in Ukraine and supporting children in learning it. The GoGlobal Speaking Club is a virtual space where children communicate English with people from various parts of the world, having different cultures and traditions. They can enhance their communication skills and hear English in all the diversity of international languages.

The first wave of clubs includes 1140 children and teenagers from all over Ukraine. 86 schools and 87 teachers have joined our project. 35 volunteers from 21 countries have joined the GoGlobal Speaking Club.

Students, teachers, and volunteers demonstrated an enormous interest in this project, so we are not going to stop and continue it!

Together with the SavED Foundation, where we are the co-founders, we launched the UActive project.  It aims at involving students in shoring up their communities. About 100 students from 5 schools in the Kyiv and Chernihiv regions are developing and implementing projects to help their school and community. The students learn project management, entrepreneurship principles, design thinking etc. 

We are deeply convinced that Ukrainian society and communities should become stronger than ever before. To do this, we need to make substantial investments in a generation of Ukrainian youth able to  take responsibility, be local agents of change, and create the environment they want to live in. That is why we created and keep on developing this project.

GoGlobal is implementing a psycho-emotional support program for Ukrainian schools. As part of this program, more than 400 teachers and school psychologists in the Chernihiv region have already received basic psychological knowledge and skills in providing first aid and recognizing signs of stress in children. 

The pilot project was launched in the Chernihiv region, as it is one of the regions most affected by the full-scale war, and some of its border areas are still in great danger. Local children have gone through many difficult experiences and need psychological support here and now.  

The program is held in the format of cascade training: experienced trainers teach a group of school teachers and psychologists, and further they pass on their knowledge to colleagues from their own schools and others.

In cooperation with the NGO «Barrier-Free”/ГО “Безбар’єрність», we arranged training for  school psychologists and teachers with experts from the Israel Trauma Coalition. 

The training is aimed at learning basic self-help skills and first aid in crisis situations. The participants learned how to talk to children and parents about the war; how teachers should respond to acute situations (shelling, panic attacks, etc.) and what a child’s reaction might be; loss (in a student’s family, in a colleague’s family) – how and why it should be talked about; professional burnout and the importance of mutual support; and the peculiarities of online learning in times of war.

22 educators attended this training and they can now train and help their colleagues.

At the end of last year, we conducted research on the impact of the war on educators. The results are available here. In January, we presented our research results to journalists, educators, experts, etc.  

1259 participants registered for the event, including 900 representatives of schools and 67 representatives of education departments. 258 representatives of public society joined the discussion. 

More than 1,000 viewers watched our press conference, and more than 2,000 viewers watched the professional educational conference.