Ferrexpo creates Femunity Teens training platform in Poltava region

The participants of the project are teenagers, the initiative became a continuation of the school of female leadership

Ferrexpo, a mining company with assets in Ukraine that is listed on the London Stock Exchange, has created a training platform for future leaders called Femunity Teens in Poltava region, an initiative that has been running for two years in a row. This was reported by Delo.ua.

The project, as emphasized in the company, is not intended only for children of Ferrexpo employees, it is aimed at local communities. Femunity Teens participants are teenagers aged 13 to 17.

Ferrexpo started implementing the principles of inclusiveness and gender equality back in 2016. The program began to be implemented more systematically a few years later, involving employees, consultants and management. One of the goals was to strengthen women’s leadership in the company. To this end, Ferrexpo launched a corporate school called Femunity, which taught women confidence and made them understand that they have the same rights to career development and self-realization as men.

One of the impetus for the creation of Femunity Teens was the feedback from the graduates of the Women’s Leadership School, who shared every year that they would have preferred to receive such information earlier.

In addition, Liubov Kozyura, one of the Femunity members and the company’s Diversity and Inclusion Manager, said that thanks to her teenage daughter, she realized that not only adults have a demand for such knowledge.

The third component of the project’s scaling up was the initiative of the first three year graduates. At the end of 2022, they formed a group that set out to transfer the knowledge they had gained at school and create a curriculum for adolescents, with the slogan “Develop yourself – develop others.”

The twenty graduates began preparing to teach, as none of them were certified trainers at the time, and they learned how to develop trainings and work with the audience.

“To create an interesting course, we conducted a survey among teenagers to determine which topics would be useful and interesting to them. Each of the future teachers chose the topic that was closest to her. After six months of preparation, in June 2023, we started,” says Irina Kaut, HR Manager of Ferrexpo’s Poltava Mining.

The basic trainings were leadership, career guidance, self-esteem, emotional intelligence, sexual education, diversity and inclusion, time management, emotional intelligence and financial literacy. In 2024, lectures on body care and spiral development dynamics were added.

After developing a training program to engage adolescent girls and boys, a wide range of methods were chosen for communication: announcements in schools, chats, social media, and internal channels.

In 2023, 150 young applicants applied for the program, of whom 54 were accepted. This year, the competition was two people per place, and 50 teenagers were enrolled in the course. The limit on the number was set to ensure that the trainings were effective and that each participant received the necessary attention.

The age group was chosen taking into account that the project addresses topics such as sexuality education, which should be discussed when one reaches a certain age.

Femunity Teens has become not only a powerful educational platform, but also a community that has united like-minded people. One of the motivations for teens to participate in the project is to find new friends, and this opportunity is being realized. In addition, in 2024, ten young graduates from last year’s cohort joined the organizing team to conduct their trainings as peer educators.

The project organizers do not hide the fact that the goal is to go beyond Horishni Plavni and Poltava region, scaling the initiative to the whole of Ukraine.

As GMK Center reported earlier, Ferrexpo has implemented a number of measures to encourage the professional and personal growth of its employees. The company is convinced that diversity in the team allows it to take into account the smallest nuances in each project.