Tobolsk hosts an awards ceremony for the winners of 2021 Formula for Good Deeds contests
17 february 2021
Tobolsk recently hosted an awards ceremony for the winners of a grants contest and a competition of volunteering projects to be implemented as part of SIBUR's Formula for Good Deeds social investment program. The year 2021 is the year of the Formula For Good Deeds’ fifth anniversary. Over the past five years, the grants contest has helped support more than 150 socially relevant community projects proposed by Tobolsk’s residents. In 2021, Tobolsk once again took the lead in terms of the number of applications submitted to the contest. The city entered a total of 83 applications covering such socially important focus areas as City, Education and Science, Sports, Environmental Protection, Culture, and Volunteering. Overall, 19 organizations and institutions that entered 23 projects were declared winners. The list of the winners included, inter alia, IT-FUTURE, a competitive education project by Razvitiye, a non-profit organization, a project by another non-profit Shkola talantov (A Talents’ School) to develop an audio guide titled "What will Tobolsk’s angels tell us?”, Tobolsk’s Third half-marathon organized by Kulturnaya Sotlitsa (A Culture Capital), a local non-profit organization, a project titled Kapitany Dvora (Courtyard Captains) by the Open Youth Theatre, and many others.
Konstantin Konstantinov, the author of the competitive education project IT-FUTURE: Our project IT-FUTURE, a winner of the 2021 grant contest, has a dual aim of helping school students learn to use state-of-the-art digital technologies while also acquiring teamwork, leadership, and mentoring skills. Participating schools will be asked to build a project team for developing practical web applications consisting of a team leader, a business analyst, a programmer, and a designer who will be chosen from the students’ ranks. To help the students translate their ideas into practice, they will be offered necessary training. Winning teams will be invited to join a summer IT camp and share their skills in building and developing web applications with other schoolchildren. We intend to involve more than a hundred students in the project through mentoring and training offered not only to IT-FUTURE participants but also to other summer camp attendees.
Tatiana Gorbunova, co-author of the Sport Time project, a teacher at V.P. Neimyshev School No. 16 : Between April and June 2021, our school will be the venue for the Sport Time project designed for school students in Grades 1 through 6. This project involves a series of activities, including game events and track and field meets, as well as a family event called "Dad, Mom and I Are One Athletic Family". Our goal is to encourage children and their parents to take up sports and healthy and active living lifestyles, and to generally promote sports and fitness. In 2020, thanks to the Tobolsk-2020 program, we were able to build a state-of-the-art 2,500 sq. m sports center on the grounds of our School No. 16 located in Neighborhood Area 15. Now that we have it, we will be able to implement additional athletic training programs for the benefit of our students. In 2021, we devised this project together with Dmitry Nosov, the other co-author of Sport Time and our school's physical education teacher, and submitted it to the contest. We are really excited that our project has won and we can now see it through to fruition.
In addition to the grant contest’s winners, awards were also presented to the winners of the 6th Contest of Employees’ Volunteering Projects (implemented under the Formula for Good Deeds program, too). Thanks to SIBUR’s support, SIBUR employees will be able to implement 22 of their own volunteering projects in the first half of 2021. The winners include: a project titled Waiting for a New Year's Miracle by Yuliya and Alexander Silchenko, ZapSibNeftekhim’s employees, which is about making a New Year-themed Advent Calendar for orphans and children with disabilities , as well as a project named the Freedom of Living, or Tail Wagging meant to create additional dog pens on the grounds of the Right to Life kennels, devised by Anastasia Prosyanik, a leading expert with Neftekhimicheskaya transportnaya kompaniya, and Svetlana Dadonkina, a ZapSibNeftekhim employee.
Since 2021 is the anniversary year for the Formula for Good Deeds program, it was decided that a special awarding procedure ought to be followed this time. In addition to the traditional ceremonial part, the authors of the winning projects were invited to take part in a business game called Project administration: teamwork, fundraising, risk management, as well as to attend a world cafe where they could get to meet each other, share their professional experiences and best practices in project implementation, and find opportunities for further interactions to cooperate in implementing their projects going forward.
Elena Belskaya, Head of ZapSibNeftekhim's Government Relations Department: In this year of the Formula for Good Deeds’ fifth anniversary, we decided to assume an additional social responsibility and organize an educational team-building activity for the grantees ahead of the start of the projects’ active implementation phase. The participants of this training activity were given an opportunity to brush up on their knowledge and skills and learn about new practical cases in project administration, risk management, and building a motivated team of professionals. They could also get to become better acquainted with each other and assure themselves of their prospective partners’ willingness to lend a helping hand in solving organizational and communication challenges in the future. We are extremely happy that on top of holding our awards ceremony for grant recipients, we were able to create a useful platform the participants could use to interact and socialize, exchange their knowledge and experience, have discussions, and acquire new skills and competences.