GYSD in Saint Petersburg

Hello everyone! Yesterday FLEX Program celebrated its 20th anniversary all across Eurasia with the help of Social Media Party! FLEX Alumni, American Councils staff and just everyone who is inspired by FLEX tweeted and posted on Facebook about their FLEX experience for a whole day! GYSD projects and community service in general were mentioned in a huge part of those posts!

Meanwhile, our Saint Petersburg alumni organized great no-grant winning GYSD projects this year! On April 27 FLEX Alumni and students of EducationUSA Competitive College Club made their contribution to improve our community through taking active part in the FLEX for CHANGE Photo Marathon held by American Councils for International Education office in St. Petersburg. This social project was designed to increase social awareness, to focus people’s attention on different problems of the society, the ones of our city in particular, and to demonstrate creative ideas youth possess for the welfare of our community. Contestants of the Photo Marathon were invited to spend an afternoon walking around the city with their cameras looking for motivating and appealing scenes that would demonstrate the subject or the main issue of 8 topics that they had to cover. 

In total, there were three teams of 5-6 people, all of whom did a great job taking photographs and managing to cover all 8 topics successfully. The second part of the Marathon was equally exciting: through

presentation, defense and discussion the participants offered great ideas on solving particular social issues that the photos they had taken depicted, and reviewed other’s submissions. All participants received promo T-shirts and souvenirs in memory of the Marathon, and enjoyed taking part in such a gamesome, unconventional activity that enabled them to bring real change to our community in a creative, imaginative, dynamic and non-traditional way.

Here are some of the best pictures of the marathon:

Irina Vasileva ’08, Yekaterina Bondar ’08,
David Petrosyan ’10, Andrey Bayev '12
and others at Petrovskiy Park Clean Up

Also, on May 4, FLEX alumni and several non-alumni participants gathered together in St. Petersburg Petrovskiy Park to clean up the area and have a picnic. Alumni spent some time cleaning up and then had some snacks to celebrate the successfully completed clean up campaign. As a result, c. 150 L of trash were collected. 

The best accomplishment of this event was the willingness of several people who happened to be around to join in and contribute to the campaign. The alumni also encouraged people who were having picnic at the time to clean up after themselves as well, and gave them unused plastic bags which they received gratefully.

Great projects - great pictures! Art always helps tremendously in raising awareness of important issues! Way to go, Saint-Petersburg! 

Stay in touch with our blog to learn even MORE about the FLEX Global Youth Service activity which is still in action! More stories are to come! :)