$10,000 per idea: Mykolaiv launches the «Youth Budget»

Mykolaiv, 8 April 2024, photo for illustrative purposes from the NikVisti archive

Five youth budget projects are planned to be implemented in Mykolaiv by the end of the year. The ideas will be selected based on the results of an open competition and a vote by local residents.

At the executive committee meeting on 25 March, the rules for the Youth Community Budget competition were approved, reports NikVesti.

Tetiana Shulichenko, Director of the Department of Economic Development, recalled that last year, in collaboration with the international organisation Save the Children, the city implemented a pilot project comprising 10 youth ideas, each of which received funding of $8,000

«This year, Save the Children is proposing to continue this project and, by the end of the year, implement five projects so far, each worth $10,000, based on the results of the vote,» noted Tetiana Shulichenko.

Young people aged between 18 and 28 can submit their ideas for the new competition. Special training sessions (hackathons) will be held for participants, running from 27 March to 3 April 2026.

Project submissions will be accepted from 6 to 28 April. They will then be reviewed and assessed from 6 to 26 May.

Voting on the projects will take place from 15 to 28 June 2026. Voting will be available online via the e-DEM platform, as well as in paper form at designated locations — at the premises of the Mykolaiv City Council’s Department of Administrative Services and at the Tourist Information Centre at 20 Admiralska Street. The winners will be announced by 2 July.

As a reminder, last year around 6,500 Mykolaiv residents took part in the vote. Ten winners were selected from among 18 candidates:

• Modular sports ground in Matviivka — Oleksii Kravchenko (1,173 votes)
• Sambo for the Unbreakable — The Art of Winning — Vitalii Krasnozhon (1,017 votes)
• Safe Way Home — Ivan Andriievskyi (560 votes)
• Horticultural therapy in the Family Square — Olena Korobkova (528 votes)
• Sports Navigator: Try something you’ve never tried before! — Dmytro Vezel (375 votes)
• Responsible Parenting in the Youth Space — Dmytro Shchoholev (343 votes)
• Know Your Rights — Kristina Berezhevska (340 votes)
• Urban Garden: promoting plant cultivation and building food security — Olena Livandovska (340 votes)
• Velyka Korenykha Youth ArtKor Hub — Neonila Metlitska (334 votes)
• Development of a youth space at the Mykolaiv Centre for Vocational Education — Viktoria Kysil (332 votes)

Mykolaiv’s participatory budget

As a reminder, in September 2017, members of the Mykolaiv City Council approved the Regulations «On the Participatory Budget of the City of Mykolaiv». The city introduced a mechanism to involve the public in the allocation of funds from Mykolaiv’s city budget.

In 2018, Mykolaiv selected its first projects from residents as part of the «Participatory Budget». Nine large and nineteen small projects were selected as winners and shared 10 million hryvnias between them. You can read more about the fate of the unsuccessful projects in the article by NikVesti.

Subsequently, residents of Mykolaiv proposed 111 projects for implementation in 2020 as part of the Participatory Budget.

In 2021, Mykolaiv residents submitted 166 ideas under the «Mykolaiv Participatory Budget for 2022» programme, with 125 of them being put to the vote. Forty projects were selected, totalling 20,347,980 hryvnias. These included 12 large-scale, 21 small-scale, and seven social projects.

However, during the state of emergency in 2022, no funds were allocated from the local budget for capital projects. And since the «Participatory Budget» provides for precisely such expenditure, the implementation of all ideas was temporarily suspended.

It should be noted that at the session in February 2026, members of the Mykolaiv City Council did not adopt a decision to approve the «Participatory Budget» programme for 2026–2028.

It should be noted that the meeting of the Budget Committee on 27 January also discussed the future implementation of the participatory budget. As Tetiana Shulichenko reported, no new projects are planned under this programme in 2026 — the plan is only to accept proposals, conduct a competitive selection process and hold a vote. It is proposed to begin the first implementation of new projects in 2027, for which the programme plans to allocate 21 million hryvnias.

According to Tetiana Shulichenko, all participatory budgeting projects were implemented, except for those in 2022, due to the outbreak of full-scale war. For these projects, a mechanism for implementation has been proposed through relevant municipal targeted programmes of the respective lead agencies — subject to the availability of funding.