Тепер мрія має номер
On the first Faculty Development Program I created and delivered, a certificate from Lviv, and a dream carried to Nairobi
A certificate arrived from Lviv this week. Number 0009790. Visiting Professor Program, Lviv Polytechnic National University, from 23 March 2026 to 23 June 2026, a course of 60 hours for the faculty of the university, signed by Vice-Rector Prof. Oleh Karyy. A single page, the trident at the top, the blue stamp of the International Office. And inside that single page, a circle that took more than two decades to close.
I entered this university and this program as a student in 1999. I was young, and I did not yet have the words for what I wanted to spend my life doing. This year I returned to the same institution, to some of the same people, not to be taught but to teach, and to teach the framework I have been building across an ocean for years. CARE+ went home. That sentence still does not feel real to me, so I will write it again. CARE+ went home.
This was the first Faculty Development Program I have ever created and delivered, fully my own. And it did not become real because of me. It became real because the university made space for it in a wartime academic year, and because particular people believed before there was any proof to believe in. Олександр Миколайович Ієвлєв (Oleksandr Ievlev) made it real. He carried the idea through every door it needed to pass through. Тетяна Горохівська (Tatyana Gorohivskaya) believed early, when belief was the only currency available. And around them stood colleagues who supported the work in a hundred small ways that appear on no certificate but hold every certificate in place. To the host, the Department of Pedagogy and Innovative Education at the Institute of Law, Psychology and Innovative Education: thank you for trusting a colleague across an ocean with work that is still being refined. Дякую за довіру.
Something else happened in those sessions that I will carry for a long time. I learned how CARE+ sounds in Ukrainian. Love · Care · Share became Любов · Турбота · Поділ. Anchor became Якір. And the keystone, the word I have carried for decades, found its home in its own language: Надія. Hope that is not optimism, hope that is a discipline. The framework was written in English, in Canadian social-work vocabulary, and the Lviv faculty did not simply receive it. They translated it back to me, truer than I had it. We still have ahead of us the careful work of translating and verifying all the books my Canadian students read, with the same anti-fabrication discipline I hold myself to. That work is not finished. But the framework now breathes in two languages, and that is a beginning.
And now I am in Nairobi.
I came to SWSD 2026 to say the next part of the dream out loud. There is a Swahili word here that I have not been able to stop thinking about: Harambee. All pull together. It is the same instinct as Любов · Турбота · Поділ, born on a different continent, in a different language, pointing at the same truth: that a community chooses to make a surplus of dignity together, on top of everything that has been taken from it.
Here is the dream, said plainly. An MSW program, On the Ground and Off the Ground at once, somewhere in the world, for a university that believes what my students and I already know: that students can come from anywhere, and be grounded in local knowledge, even when they cannot attend in person. Lviv proved it. My evening was their morning. The Pacific and the Carpathians met four times in one room, and the teaching did not weaken across the distance. It deepened. We are no longer wondering whether it is possible. We are looking for the university that dreams the same dream.
Harambee will happen. Якір holds. Надія continues.
To Lviv Polytechnic, to the people who made the impossible ordinary, to every faculty member who took their own questions seriously in a year when no one would have blamed them for taking them less seriously: дякую. You gave my first Faculty Development Program a home, and you gave my life’s framework its mother tongue.
Україна переможе.
З повагою, Саша
Dr. Oleksandr (Sasha) Kondrashov
Thompson Rivers University
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