Citizens in Transnistria Get Involved in Citizen Participation Program

A CPP Consensus Meeting in Bender. Bender - March 19, 2009. The first community meeting facilitated by the Citizen Participation Program (CPP) in Bender, a small city in the Transnistrian region of Moldova, did not start well.  Citizens attending the preliminary meeting argued that CPP’s objectives were impractical and its methodology irrelevant.  In exasperation, one participant challenged CPP facilitators to show them just one successful project implemented by a community with CPP support.  Soon after this incident, in late December, the facilitators took a group of skeptical citizens to Caplani, a village on the other side of the Nistru River, to attend their Opening Ceremony.  The ceremony marked not only the completion of their high school renovation project, but also CPP’s 200th successful project in Moldova.   The Citizen Participation Program (CPP) builds the capacity of citizens to create tangible and positive change in their own communities.  The program does this by providing leadership training, mentoring, and funding for citizen-initiated projects.  As a result, NGOs and citizen groups are better able to mobilize their community, advocate for change, and hold government accountable. The visit made a deep impression on the guests and energized them to organize themselves.  This new motivation led to a very productive CPP-facilitated Consensus Meeting in January.   Valerii Nicheporuk, a member of the Bender Board of Education, who visited the school in Caplani shared that, "it was remarkable to witness firsthand the [activities and] results of the CPP program, results that we also want." Fifty-nine parents, teachers, students, and representatives of the Department of Education participated in the meeting and voted democratically to improve their community’s school.  They decided their top priority was to fix the school’s faзade damaged from the violence of the civil war in the Transnistria region in the early 1990s.   Initially resistant to the CPP concepts and processes, the community of Bender is now eager to promote CPP across Transnistria.  Liudmila Klepachevskaya, the group’s leader, plans to "invite other communities to their Opening Ceremony to show how collaboration through the CPP methodology benefits a community." Perhaps the most important accomplishment of this USAID’s project is showing communities like this one that they can make positive changes in their lives.

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