When Norwegian Jørgen Bø visited Ukraine for the first time four years ago, he saw a country with a lot of potential. Last year he moved to Kyiv and co-founded a festival aimed at developing a common vision of Ukraine’s future.
The first festival and conference, called Connect Ukraine, was held in July in Kyiv. Bø hopes it will be an annual event and a second one is planned for this summer.
The three-day event gathered more than 50 speakers – innovators, creators and social entrepreneurs – to present and brainstorm ideas about how to promote Ukraine abroad and attract investment to the country.
Since then, Bø, 27, has moved to New York, but he will return this summer to host the second Connect Ukraine conference.
“I saw that a lot of things that I focus on in my life – empowering people, connecting people and opportunities – were a very good match with Ukraine,” he told the Kyiv Post.
Bø first came to Ukraine four years ago. Living in Oslo, he hosted 600 couch surfers at his residence, and many of them were Ukrainians. “This created an interest for me in Ukraine,” he said.
He went to Lviv in western Ukraine during a road trip around Europe. Bø says he hadn’t known what to expect, and was truly fascinated by the beauty of the city.
He was also surprised at the injustice he noticed.
“I met people who were the same age as me with exact same talents and abilities, and saw how different their situation was – just because they were born a little bit further south than I was,” he said.
That was when he felt he could contribute to Ukraine’s development.
Since then Bø has visited the country five times, bringing his friends with him and getting to know Ukrainians working in the creative industries.
He says that he has seen many extraordinary things in Ukraine that can’t be found in any other country. One of them was the popular street food festival Ulichnaya Eda that gathers from 10,000 to 20,000 guests.
“It was one of the most life-changing experiences for me,” Bø said. “We don’t have anything like that in Norway.”
The first Connect Ukraine festival kicked off on July 28, 2017 at the Platforma Art Factory in Kyiv. The three-day conference gathered 2,000 guests. (Natasha Ktonado)
He wasn’t in Ukraine when he actually decided to act.
Bø met his future business partner Sophia Yushchenko, the daughter of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, at the Oslo Freedom Forum in May 2017. They came up with the idea to arrange a big meeting with inspiring talks and workshops.
Bø decided to quit his job as a hotel manager in Oslo, moved to Ukraine in June 2017, and got down to business.
Connect Ukraine
It took just two months for the idea to become reality. The first Connect Ukraine festival kicked off on July 28 at the Platforma Art Factory in Kyiv, the location also used by the street food festival that impressed Bø.
The three-day conference gathered 2,000 guests. The program covered panel discussions and inspirational talks by 40 Ukrainian and 18 international speakers from the U.S., Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands, including Casey Fenton, the founder of CouchSurfing; Toni Lane Casserly, a bitcoin and blockchain expert and co-founder of the Bitnation virtual nation; and David Passiak, the author of the books Empower and Disruption Revolution, which examine innovative changes in working and business.
The event featured workshops for brainstorming ideas and co-creation sessions, where participants drew up plans for implementing their ideas. There were evening entertainment events for networking.
Bø believes that the event, which was sponsored by Ukrainian businesses, gave a start to creating in Ukraine a community of ambitious smart progressive minds, who will support and help each other.
He says that it wasn’t a problem to find financing, and neither was it difficult to attract speakers.
“People are interested in Ukraine, we just have to do that job of getting them to come here and see all the opportunities.”
Ambitious goal
Despite being based in New York now, where he is working for environmental services company Chooose, Bø will return for the second Connect Ukraine festival, which will focus on how technology and other industries can create growth in Ukraine. For instance, some topics will be how blockchain technology can help fight corruption and how the creative industries are able to connect better with Western markets.
Bø has an ambitious goal for Connect Ukraine to become one of the leading technology festivals in the Eastern Europe. “This is a country where I can make something important happen,” he says.
www.connect-ukraine.com
