How can governments bring in people with different experiences and use their skills to support change from within?

Kurk Lietuvai (Create Lithuania) has been doing this in Lithuania for more than a decade. The programme brings young professionals, including Lithuanians returning from abroad, into the public sector to work on specific challenges together with public institutions. Over time, it has also become a way to test new approaches to public-sector work and show that government can be an attractive place for ambitious professionals.

This Lithuanian experience was later adapted in Ukraine through Create Ukraine. The context is very different: Ukrainian institutions are operating during a full-scale war, while at the same time working on recovery and reforms needed for EU accession. Create Ukraine brings Ukrainians with international experience back to the country and places them inside public institutions, where they work on concrete projects identified together with those institutions.

We will share what has worked in both programmes, but also where the model becomes difficult in practice. We will look at what happens when people with experience outside government enter established public institutions, what kind of management helps them succeed, and what we have learned about adapting the same idea to two very different countries.