The activities of the organization Power of Ideas are aimed at preserving the community and culture of Avdiivka amid the displacement and scattering of its population due to war. The core practice involves organizing three-day intensive cultural residencies in the Kosiv region of Western Ukraine for teenagers from the Avdiivka community. During the residency, the youth engage with Carpathian crafts, musicians, and traditions, while simultaneously actualizing and presenting their own heritage from the Donetsk region. The teenagers document family stories, regional recipes, and photographs to build a shared digital archive, while practicing traditional singing as a tool for connection and maintaining a living bond with their hometown.
Our small centre of the world is an organisation called Power of Ideas, founded in Avdiivka by people who continue to carry the city with them wherever they are.
For us, Avdiivka is more than a place on the map. Although the community has temporarily lost its territory, it remains alive through the relationships, memories, stories, and cultural practices of its people. We see our work as a way of maintaining these connections and creating spaces where trust, belonging, and a sense of home can endure despite displacement and war.
We are drawn to the places where familiar routes have been broken and communities scattered. In these circumstances, culture becomes more than heritage, it becomes a way of finding orientation, rebuilding connections, and imagining a future. The living traditions of Avdiivka and the wider Donetsk region are one of the foundations on which this work rests.
Together with people who share a belief in the value of local culture, intergenerational dialogue, and community participation, we create opportunities for those connected to Avdiivka to learn, explore, create, and remain connected to one another.
One of these opportunities is Avdiivka. Living Heritage — a three-day gathering for teenagers from the Avdiivka community, including both young people who remain in the region and those who have been displaced by the war. Bringing together adolescents, local tradition bearers, and cultural practitioners, the gathering creates a space where heritage can be experienced not as something distant or museum-like, but as a living part of everyday life.
The participants are young people who have already begun exploring the histories, traditions, and memories of their own families and community. Together, they travel to the Kosiv region in western Ukraine, where they meet craftspeople, storytellers, musicians, and community members who continue to sustain local traditions in their daily lives. Through conversations, walks, workshops, shared meals, songs, and creative activities, they encounter both the cultural heritage of Kosiv and the traditions they carry from Avdiivka.
The residency is built around a simple idea: every community is a small centre of the world. Each place holds its own knowledge, values, memories, and ways of caring for one another. By encountering another region and sharing their own stories, participants are invited to see their hometown not only through the lens of loss and displacement, but also through its cultural richness and continuing presence in people's lives.
Along the way, they gather stories, recipes, photographs, memories, and reflections that become part of a shared archive created by the participants themselves. More importantly, they create new relationships — with one another, with older generations, and with the cultural traditions that continue to shape who they are.
At a time when many young people from Avdiivka feel disconnected from the place they come from, these encounters offer an opportunity to rediscover belonging. They remind participants that even when a city becomes inaccessible, its heritage remains alive through people, practices, and shared memory. Above all, we hope that each young person leaves with a stronger sense of connection — to their community, to one another, and to the understanding that they, too, have a role in carrying Avdiivka's living heritage into the future.
