The School of Leaders for the Development of Urban Spaces "My Territory" began work on September 15 at the Boiling Point of NSTU NETI. Within the framework of the project, the leaders of future youth volunteer teams will be trained by the best experts and will master competencies that usually fall out of the "classic" project training: diagnostics of the local territory, pre-project analysis of the problem, formation of a volunteer team, and involving residents of the territory in solving social and technological problems of urban areas.
The project team and partners have collected cases — problems of local territories of Novosibirsk and Berdsk that have real customers: among them are authorities, deputies of the city council, representatives of municipalities, and entrepreneurs. Project teams will decide how to develop winter sports in microdistricts, how to refine a specific area around the Tower on Marx, and how to put the embankments of Berdsk in order. Participation in this project will enable interested young citizens to immerse themselves in the problems of the territory as much as possible, and become leaders of local youth groups that are developing and initiating projects to create a comfortable urban environment.
The work of the School will be conducted under the guidance of the following mentors: Irina Skalaban, the head of the branding project of Novosibirsk State Technical University NETI, Kirill Zubarev, and the leader of the Boiling Point of NSTU NETI, and Lada Yurchenko, a specialist in socio-cultural design, social marketing and marketing of territories.
"One of the difficult competencies that the school participants will have to learn is the ability to work in teams. Our task is to teach students how to negotiate and combine different views on one problem. We show that every serious problem has many aspects, and participants should, together with customers and case supervisors, look for the best way to solve it," said Irina Skalaban, one of the mentors of the project, head of the Urban Research Laboratory of IST NSTU, Doctor of Sociological Sciences.
The leadership school will be held in several stages, and the schedule can be found on the website. Youth volunteer teams will implement the project solutions found during the work directly in the city territory.
The School of Leaders has become a logical continuation of the projects "Sphere of Influence" (2019), "City Manager" (2022/23) and is being implemented with the grant support of the Federal Agency for Youth Affairs (Rosmolodezh). The educational program of the School was prepared by teachers of leading universities in Novosibirsk (NSTU, NSU, NSUADA, SIU), Tomsk (TSU), practitioners — trainers of the Skolkovo School of Management, and heads of significant urban projects were involved in the project work.
Based on the results of training at the School of Leaders of NSTU NETI, youth volunteer teams will be formed in two cities of the Novosibirsk agglomeration — in Novosibirsk and Berdsk — and 5 urban development projects will be selected for launch.