SPP Development Ukraine is launching a series of updates on the progress of Powering the Future, a long-term cooperation program with partner communities aimed at developing school social entrepreneurship. Today, we focus on the Vysokivska community in Zhytomyr Region.
One of the initiatives within Powering the Future is the partnership “Children. Business. Community. Entrepreneurial Ideas That Create Change,” which promotes school social entrepreneurship and engages young people in developing practical solutions for their communities.
As part of the partnership with the Vysokivska community, students at the local lyceum presented their business ideas in a competitive selection. After the selection, the chosen projects moved to the next stage: practical implementation.
During the selection, students presented projects designed to address specific environmental challenges in their school and community. The Composters team proposed a solution to reduce organic waste at the school. The Eco-Boom team focused on reducing plastic waste in both the school and the wider community. The “Bottle Cap Design” project proposed collecting and reusing plastic bottle caps to create decorative and practical items.
During their presentations, the students explained the problems they aimed to address, who was affected by them, and how their proposed solutions could work in practice.
Representatives of the Vysokivska community, the lyceum, SPP Development Ukraine, and a certified school social entrepreneurship trainer took part in the evaluation. The jury recognized all the business ideas as promising and provided recommendations for their further development.
The teams decided to combine the Eco-Boom and Bottle Cap Design projects into a single initiative, bringing together approaches to collecting, sorting, and reusing plastic waste. This strengthened the project’s practical focus and created more opportunities for its further development.
SPP Development Ukraine supported the practical implementation of the selected student projects. For the joint Eco-Boom and Bottle Cap Design initiative, the company is providing an extruder to produce 3D-printing filament from recycled plastic bottle caps. For The Composters project, SPP Development Ukraine is providing equipment for composting organic waste.
For SPP Development Ukraine, this initiative is part of the Group’s systematic CSR efforts under the Powering the Future project and reflects the company’s long-term approach to working with partner communities. In the next stories in this series, we will share updates from other partner communities, highlight project results and the scaling of school-based enterprises, and celebrate the achievements of young entrepreneurs.
