Cultural Platform Zakarpattya NGO creates safety accessories for teens and youngsters, helping them sustain mental and physical health under stress.
Ukrainian adolescents are now experiencing a difficult period of growing up during a full-scale invasion, which negatively affects their well-being and brings about tons of anxiety. The Cultural Platform team decided to create a handy set of safety accessories for young people to make staying in shelters (and life in general) less stressful.
The safety kit includes:
- paracord keychain that allows you to weave knots, engage fine motor skills, and focus on learning new types of knot tying;
- whistle made of recycled plastic to signal your location or simply be able to consciously focus on breathing to calm yourself down;
- “krutelyk” — a human-like creature woven from reflective paracord, which also glows in the dark, allowing you to be less afraid of power outages or staying in a shelter;
- carabiner made of recycled plastic that combines all the elements of the set and easily attaches to clothing, backpacks, bag loops, or keys.
The use of recycled materials aims to make the most of the planet’s limited resources by promoting the idea of rethinking and reusing already-existing items. The Ukrainian tradition of knot-tying, which found its manifestation in the creation of embroidered vyshyvankas, takes a modernized turn — helping to ground oneself and focus on repetitive action through tying paracord knots. The woven creature glows in the dark when the lights go out and reflects light from the headlights when out on the street, directly enhancing the safety of teenagers and adolescents.
Cultural Platform has a global mission of popularizing safety merch in Ukraine and promoting safety culture as a worldview ecosystem that exists not only in the shape of digital products but also physically. Product design allows us to embody the aforementioned ideas in a suitable format while practically improving the youth’s safety amidst war.
The adolescents who are living their lives under these circumstances are the true “krutelyky” (cool-ios) and we must increase the level of safety of their existence.
The project is realized by the Cultural Platform Zakarpattya NGO with the support of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Ukraine.
Anastasiya Mishustina
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