RollerDrome in the village club building is a community building center in the Velyka Pysarivka Hromada of the Sumy Region. During outreach meetings before the project began, people from the surrounding villages expressed a need for a place where children and their families could relax. One of the advantages of the club is the presence of a bomb shelter, which the project team has equipped for comfortable use.

The Velyka Pysarivka Hromada is one of the 10 hromadas that won a competition held by the Ukraine-Moldova American Enterprise Fund and Cedos. As part of the competition, each community received a grant of 1,000,000 UAH to create a community building center, along with mentoring support from experts in architecture, culture, communications, and social interaction.

About the Project

In addition to a space for roller skating, the plan for the center included creating a large hall where community discussions could be held, and legal and psychological assistance provided. NGO RISE+, which implemented the project, intended to dedicate a smaller room for film screenings, training sessions, and first aid courses. The center would also enable the delivery of mobile services from the Pension Fund and the regional employment center, significantly easing access to these services for the people in the community.

Even during the process of setting up the space, activities such as robotics classes, movie nights, and even board games in the shelter during shelling were already taking place there.

Unfortunately, the renovation of the center was temporarily halted due to intensified shelling by Russia in the Sumy border region, which escalated in February 2024 and led to the evacuation of a large number of people from the community.

The project team from NGO RISE+ was forced to relocate to the city of Okhtyrka, the nearest district center to the hromada. However, they did not abandon the idea of community building and, by June of this year, they had opened a free communication center there.

With the onset of the full-scale invasion, life in the Velyka Pysarivka Hromada shifted entirely to an online format. Thanks to the establishment of the community building center, people in the community once again had the opportunity to communicate, create, live, dream, and spend time together in meaningful ways, in person! Despite all the obstacles, we achieved our main goal—initiating the formation of a conscious, united community. We are grateful to Cedos and the Ukraine-Moldova American Enterprise Fund for supporting our idea!

Viktoria Mykhailuchenko, Chairwoman of the Board of NGO RISE+

Read also about the opening of a community building center in Chortkiv in the Ternopil Region, about the inclusive coworking space which opened in the Kovel Hromada in Volyn, and about the Nezlamni veteran space which opened in Nizhyn.