Hello! We invite you to look through all the news, setbacks, and wins of the NGO “KOWO,” specifically the projects “School++” and the “KOWO Creative Space,” in 2024. This year we dedicated to… survival 🙂, yet even in those conditions we still managed to move forward.

Our team, volunteers, and students supported one another and kept fighting for a better future. That is why we continue to exist.

Before we start, we want to again thank all our friends, volunteers, donors, partners, and everyone who cares and believes in us.

Let’s go!

First things first, let’s re‑introduce ourselves!

We are a team of activists united around building communities in IT, volunteering, and culture in Kropyvnytskyi and across Ukraine.


That is why we created the KOWO organization, and today we work in four key areas:

  1. KOWO event venue. A place for educational and civic events hosted by local NGOs and initiative groups to strengthen civic engagement and community cohesion.
  2. School++: free education for teens and adults. We run online for adults worldwide.
  3. Library: we make professional literature accessible and promote reading and Ukrainian books through a library and events in Kropyvnytskyi.
  4. Coworking — the first in Kropyvnytskyi. A place to work and build community focused on programmers and creative communities. It is also one of the largest sources of revenue for our NGO.

Roma and Katya

KOWO’s coordinators and, unfortunately, main donors — Roman and Katya, and we are also the authors of this report 🙂

We work as software engineers and, in our free time together with our team and volunteers, try to make the world a bit better: helping people gain a programmer’s profession at School++ and sustaining the KOWO creative space so different organizations can host educational events there.

Financial crisis and the story of how we fought it

The beginning of the year


2024 began with the realization that we were short on money. It was getting harder to support KOWO (the offline space in Kropyvnytskyi) and to remain the primary donors. We seriously considered closing the space and, of course, shared this with our team right away.

That’s how the chat save-kowo was born.

We had to urgently find a way out. We considered options:

  • look for grants, because we had often heard that our work could be eligible for support
  • co-rent the premises with other NGOs
  • promote the coworking and grow the number of clients
  • find other ways to earn money (?)

Find more numbers at the end of the report 😉

The thorny road to funding

Spoiler: we did not find a quick fix 🙂, but we did a lot — started promoting the coworking on social media, made a cool promo video, built a more convenient personalized payment system, looked for people willing to share the space with us, and shared with the whole team the burden of seeing KOWO’s monthly financial reports 🫠

We concluded that if we failed to raise revenue, it would mean the demand for KOWO wasn’t that high — and we were ready to accept that without despair. If that’s the reality, there is no point living in illusions.

In desperation we even ran a 90% discount for the coworking to understand whether people really needed it.

KOWO + Skyscraper = <3

By mid‑year we negotiated co‑location in the same space with the NGO “Skyscraper” (here is their 2024 report): in August they moved to us, and now we split the rent evenly.

“Skyscraper” is a team of experienced reporters, journalists, and digital specialists who for years have contributed to the sustainable development of Ukrainian cities. Their focus areas include, though are not limited to, safety, ecology, inclusion, sustainability, architecture, energy efficiency, participation, government accountability, urban policy, public transport, local business, and building cities of equal opportunity for all.

Thanks to this partnership, we had more diverse events, and paying the rent got easier 💰

A 2‑million grant

At the end of 2024 we joined the “Resilience Lab” — a joint initiative of the International Renaissance Foundation “IRF” and the agency “Bread for the World”. Within the Lab, we won a grant of almost 2 million UAH. 🔥

The driving force behind this was Nastia. We had applied for grants before but with little success, so our hopes were modest this time. Nastia persisted to the end, and it paid off.

Under the grant, we are implementing three projects:

  • reform the KOWO library
  • run 3D‑modeling and robotics courses for teens
  • invite well‑known people to Kropyvnytskyi and host unforgettable offline events in our space

Competing for the grant was not easy and, as usual, grants come with a lot of bureaucracy. Still, we hope it will be worth it, and the foundation’s support is crucial for our survival in 2025.

The commitments we’ve taken on will push us, and we are grateful for the chance — we must not let anyone down.

Overview of 2024 income and expenses


Before diving into details (you can find them at the end of this report), take a look at the results of our efforts after the events described above. We hope this chart makes it easier to grasp our fight to break even.

And our fight is not over. In wartime, stability is a luxury.

KOWO Creative Space in 2024

Events overview

  • helped organize and host 38 trainings and 15 events. We will share more about the most interesting ones later! 😉
  • hosted 36 internal meetings of our guests
  • found and onboarded co‑tenants (“Skyscraper”), designed and executed a space reorganization due to their move‑in
  • on average, 20 different people visited KOWO every day
  • received camera donations to enhance video surveillance and make our space even safer! Thank you, Dmytro!

… and now more details on KOWO events

ProMental Podcast

The youth podcast “ProMental” was created in partnership with the NGO “Skyscraper,” KOWO Creative Space, and the Department of Youth and Sports of the Kirovohrad Regional Military Administration, within the project “Public Hub ‘Safety Ambassadors’,” supported by the Police Stabilization Project (PSP) funded by the Government of Canada through Global Affairs Canada.

Together with Andrii Fomenko, a practicing crisis psychologist, we produced 7 episodes — all to help Ukrainians become more informed about mental health, care for themselves, and understand others.

For this podcast we received recognition in culture, youth, and sports from the regional administration, and from howareu.com on World Mental Health Day.

PrintArmy

We crowdfunded plastic for the 3D printer back in 2023, and throughout 2024 we printed various useful parts for the Armed Forces of Ukraine 🙂 In October we reached 5 kg of printed parts!

Film screenings

From time to time we hosted screenings of non‑entertainment films.

We especially want to mention the film “Beyond the Horizon,” shot by the children’s film and TV studio “KU‑RAZH” (Kropyvnytskyi) in the summer of 2023. The cast included 12–17‑year‑olds, among them displaced children from temporarily occupied territories. The film references the full‑scale Russo‑Ukrainian war — occupation, shelling, the explosion of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant.

By the way, KOWO was also one of the locations for the KU‑RAZH studio’s film “Heirs. The Stolen Crest.”

Psychologists’ meetups at KOWO

We were very happy that our space became a hub this year for the volunteer organization of psychologists “Volunteer.” In some ways they are like us — they work with teens and their parents, teaching how to act in difficult life situations (the project “PORUCH”).


Exhibition and blood donation in Kropyvnytskyi within the project ‘Blossom 🌸’


Together with donor.ua we invited people to donate blood to save someone’s life.

Donors received gifts and prizes from the Portal Cinema, the Faino Market chain, and the CrazyLand family entertainment center.

Our guests also had a chance to see the #Побач project — an exhibition of portraits of blood donors accompanied by their personal stories.

Our whole team loved this event — we were impressed by the organizing team’s dedication, the attention to hygiene and proper procedure, the care for donors, and the number of people who came.

School++ in 2024

State of things

Compared to the first years of the full‑scale invasion, the number of students is decreasing. The formula is clear:

  • Exhaustion from war
  • Global IT crisis
  • IT crisis in Ukraine
  • People have adapted to new circumstances and are not ready to change professions
  • Power outages

Even under such tough conditions, students come to us and study, and volunteers continue to help them. School++ lives on.

This year 113 students completed the Computer Science course. We conducted 6,000 code reviews, students received 24,000 grades, of which 15,400 were fives and 2,000 were twos 🥲, and at least 13 told us they found jobs.

More than a third of students came via friends’ recommendations.

Many students come to us to gain the knowledge needed to pass companies’ trainings and camps such as EPAM’s, giving them hope for future job offers.

School++: UI/UX design course

The course author and mentor is Vlad Fedorenko, a UX/UI designer at CompatibL and a curator for the UX Beginning course at @prjctr_institute.

In short, the program covered:

  • fundamentals of visual design for interfaces
  • conducting interviews, creating personas and user flows
  • UX methods and testing your own solutions

Out of 41 applicants, 15 were admitted, and we ended up with 10 graduates!

School++: DevOps course

In the fall, School++ launched a DevOps course with our friend Serhii Sallo. It was designed both for backend engineers and those aiming directly at DevOps, and in practice it is also useful for mobile and frontend developers.

Serhii can not only talk about penguins Linux 🐧 and how the internet works, but also help you get comfortable with CI/CD and AWS.

By the way, with Serhii we organized an online tour to the “Akademik Vernadsky” station in 2023 (https://www.youtube.com/live/pV0pwDCoSus) and an offline meetup at KOWO in 2024.

School++: experimental iOS course

We launched a beta iOS course, and for that our friends at Onix donated a Mac mini. We are setting it up for remote access so that anyone can learn iOS development even without the required hardware.

School++ and Advent of Code 2024

Traditionally, we took part in Advent of Code.

Finishing it completely is very hard.

About 30 School++ students and alumni joined!

And four of our students even outpaced the School++ founder, though Roman still hopes to catch up 😊

School++: various “under‑the‑hood” improvements

We keep improving:

  • provided more student support — taking their mental state into account and trying to offer help in tough times
  • sustained the speaking club with different activities for those who want to improve conversational English
  • converted the School++ page on LinkedIn into an educational organization so people can list us in the “Education” section
  • improved our system for catching people who cheat on the entrance exam (with the advent of ChatGPT this got harder 🙂)
  • recorded a video on how to do code reviews:

School++: teen track

In 2024 we launched six teen groups of 10–12 people each.

Every learner is so unique that each could be the subject of a dedicated story :)

One story we are especially proud of is a student who never gave up and stayed motivated, even when programming was extremely hard. Their persistence and desire to learn inspires us to help. Our chat reached 500+ messages — not to mention lots of code and recorded video reviews. Oleh, if you are reading this — success is not only for those for whom everything comes easy, but for those who keep moving forward despite difficulties!

Another story is about a student who traveled every week from Znamianka to Kropyvnytskyi to study at School++.

Finally

Financial report: 2024


*Most expenses under the project are scheduled for 2025.

Thanks

Our team thanks everyone who supported us and walked this path with KOWO and School++:

KOWO’s future in 2025

Thank you for reading this report!

We have weathered the 2024 crisis, so we will continue our work in 2025 and, we hope, in the years to come. We need your support to do this, and on our donations portal it is very easy to subscribe to a monthly donation.

If you wish, you can always write to us at info@kowo.me — we will be happy to hear your feedback, questions, proposals, initiatives, anything 😊

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