On a chilly November day in Kyiv, Ukraine, Inna Semenenko takes cover in a bomb shelter as sirens warn of Russia's latest attack. Media agencies report that the strike is different: a new ballistic missile with greater range.
For Ukrainians, it's part of a grim survival routine - hearing blaring tones, seeking safety, emerging to continue the day.
Semenenko, a professor, is one of several Ukrainian citizens and refugees who are earning professional certificates from Cornell through a social impact collaboration between eCornell and Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (KNU).
Twice displaced by the war in Ukraine, Inna is not only surviving - she is driving change. Through a social impact partnership between Cornell University and Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, she earned eCornell certificates in public sector leadership and project management.
The longtime educator and researcher recently completed certificates in Project Management and Public Sector Leadership, enhancing her skills to create community development proposals, such as one to bring clean water to war-ravaged villages.
Offering professional growth and fellowship, the courses "were a great distraction from this current situation," said Semenenko, who has been displaced by the conflict twice - in 2014 and 2022 - along with her employer, Volodymyr Dahl East Ukrainian National University.
"Sometimes you won't have electricity for four hours, from 10 to 2 o'clock. Sometimes it is very unpredictable. I studied everywhere I had an opportunity, and very often I did that in the car driving from Lviv to Kyiv, so a very unusual experience," she said. "Then you start to learn something new and you also feel the support of other people, those who were able to provide this for us."
Self-reflection and community renewal
During seven-hour trips across Ukraine to reconnect with family living in safer areas, and in her rented Kyiv apartment, Semenenko absorbed lessons from the Public Sector Leadership certificate, authored by former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Labor Seth Harris '83, who has taught in programs from the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy.
The certificate is designed to help participants assess their skills as leaders in the context of their public institutions, including the factors that motivate their employees. Using leadership models and goal-setting methods, learners discover how to navigate constraints and use the strategies most effective for their organizations.
The program affected Semenenko in an unexpected way: She stepped down as head of her university's department of economics and entrepreneurship after eight years to shift her energy to different, vitally important matters in her country.
"Harris' lectures were really inspiring and insightful," she said, "and actually changed my life."
As head of her university's Resource Center for Sustainable Development and in her work with VNG International - an association that designs and implements projects to strengthen local governments in developing and transitioning countries - Semenenko supports Ukrainian communities with immediate needs and long-term recovery efforts.
One of her projects addresses the aftermath of the June 2023 explosion that caused the Kakhovka dam failure, leading to extreme flooding in southern Ukraine's rural communities.
"We understood that they have a lot of challenges. And one of them is the water supply, [a need that] intensified after the explosion," Semenenko said. "This led to a lot of villages not having access to drinking water. We're implementing one of the projects that deals with installations to get water supply to the people."
Inna Semenenko visits a Sysav waste management facility in Malmö, Sweden, on a trip organized by the International Renaissance Foundation, a part of the Environmental Policy and Advocacy Initiative for Ukraine.
In search of funding support, Semenenko has submitted the project to the Netherlands Enterprise Agency's Ukraine Partnership Facility. She is also seeking funding for a project that will install sustainable energy sources to supply water during power outages.
The techniques Semenenko learned in the Cornell certificate courses have helped her reframe project timelines. Instead of asking how long a task will take, she now sets limits and asks what will prevent teams from reaching goals on time.
"That's helped me a lot because when we were planning some of the activities within one of our projects, that was the exact question we had to ask our coordinators and the participants from the communities," she said. "Everyone knows that, more or less, it will take one month to make the functional analysis of the community. Right now, we expect this delay, but we were prepared for it because we discussed it before."
Semenenko has also used the coursework's "community scorecard" method, which brings citizens, service providers and local governments together to discuss what needs to be done at certain times.
"What is really needed by the people in this specific village is this bottom-up approach," she said. "We put that approach into one of the projects submitted to the donor. We tried to show this agility by putting the specific activities that can make us shift and be flexible during the implementation, especially in this Ukrainian condition."
International support for recovery
Public Sector Leadership and Project Management are two of seven certificate programs offered through the social impact collaboration between eCornell and KNU. For Semenenko, and many other Ukrainian citizens and refugees who have received scholarships for the program, the experience is a new way to engage with peers around the world.
"It was important not only to see what you teach but how you teach to try to adapt it to our Ukrainian realities. This is also a good way to combine the knowledge from different countries and the best skills to solve some of the global problems before us," Semenenko said. "Here we have a lot of damages, a lot of losses, and now we need to think, 'Which is the best way to avoid the mistakes and the bottlenecks that can arise?'"
Millions of Ukrainians have become migrants all over the world, and the consequences for the nation's higher education institutions and students are significant. Semenenko contends there may be too many universities for the quantity of students.
She and her university colleagues are preparing for the future: More faculty members have joined Semenenko in eCornell programs, and she says they are applying some of the approaches during their teaching and research activities.
"The academic staff of different Ukrainian universities - not only ours - they face a lot of problems. They try to focus on more positive things than what this war brought to us. So do I," Semenenko said. "I really hope that Ukraine will win and the war will be over, and we will continue the collaboration between our universities."
Torie Michelle Anderson is a writer for eCornell.
