Dear CACTUS friends,

It has been almost 6 months since the end of the CACTUS 2009 program. Since then a lot has changed, many of our fellow staffmembers went home or got jobs that will keep them away from joining us fully in the future. Others have joined or stepped up helping the program even more.

A big thing that went on after CACTUS 2009 were the community projects of CACTUS alumni. These projects were created by participants in regional groups during CACTUS 2009 and afterwards they were given mini-grants and mentors to see their project to success. Overall 7 projects were completed on various topics: helping kids with special needs, running english language trainings, conducting a career fair and visiting orphans. The projects faced some serious difficulties as people and time shortages, logistic problems and this autumn's flu epidemic. But needless to say all of the projects ended up being fantastic! The participants were so thrilled by conducting their own community initiatives and we, as their mentors, were very proud of them. The community has also had the best responses to these projects.

With that in mind, we set up working on the next year CACTUS program - the CACTUS'10 forum! Building up on the success of last year, it will happen and it will be bigger and better than before. We are going to invite 60 young community leaders from all over Ukraine and 20 from the host city of Ternopil. There they will go through training on all the in and outs of running community projects by visiting themed special workshops of their choice. In the end they will collaborate with other participants in their area and will plan advanced community projects to implement with the help of our grant fund!

We are all very excited to pull CACTUS'10 together and we expect it to have a great positive effect in Ukraine by empowering a new generation of project leaders.

Thank you again for your continued support and if you have a chance to contribute to the CACTUS'10 program - please do so, it will be very appreciated!

Warmest wishes,
Illya

PS: Watch out for the official CACTUS website soon!

Pictures:

• A career fair organized by CACTUS alumni in Stryi (JPG)
• CACTUS alumni visiting an orphanage in Bila Tserkva (JPG)
• "Painting for peace" with the kids in Ternopil (JPG)