The Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU) recently organized an online leadership workshop for students in the 8th to 11th grades in the Lviv Region. Over four days, 150 high schoolers who want to bring changes to their schools and their neighborhoods and want to develop themselves developed their leadership skills. The course was organized by the UCU Recruiting Office and the UCU Leadership Center.
The intensive course was based on solving practical cases which participants of the UCU Lviv Business School’s Innovations and Entrepreneurship Program and the Institute of Leadership and Management proposed to the students.
This year’s course was part of the Character of a Leader among Teenagers research which the UCU Leadership Center is conducted with the support of the Ihnatowycz Institute for Leadership of Canada’s Ivey Business School.
According to the head of the UCU Recruiting Department, Anna-Yustyna Turchynovska (herself an UCU grad), UCU previously conducted a leadership workshop “but for master’s students. Having this experience, we decided to work on developing a program for high schoolers. Our goal was to gather them together, help them develop their leadership skills, and teach them how to do case work. This practice showed that leadership is not often discussed at Ukrainian schools. Nevertheless, the participants quickly plunged into the work and worked well. They proposed solutions to the tasks presented in the cases and conducted their own small research of the market, the target audience, etc.”
Some 30 UCU students and graduates were mentors to the high schoolers.