Rebuild Green Hackathon 2026 Launches: 29 Countries Unite Around Real Challenges Facing Ukrainian Communities
Updated: 19 minutes ago
On 3 October, Rebuild Green Hackathon 2026 launched as the second cycle of the international Rebuild Green 2030 programme. This year, the programme has brought together around 100 experts, representatives of different stakeholder groups and beneficiaries from 29 countries around seven real challenges facing Ukrainian communities.
More than 65 participants were selected from applications submitted by international experts and Ukrainian professionals from different disciplines. Over four weeks, they will work in international interdisciplinary teams together with communities, mentors and experts, transforming real local problems into solutions capable of progressing towards acceleration, financing and practical implementation.
The Hackathon is part of Rebuild Green 2030 — a long-term programme developed by FIABCI-Ukraine and SYNCHRO SPACE in partnership with Modulina Straw Panels and an international network of partners.
From the First Hackathon to Rebuild Green 2030
The Hackathon was opened by Alissa Bankovska, Co-Founder of Rebuild Green 2030, CEO of SYNCHRO SPACE and President of FIABCI-Ukraine. She presented the programme’s logic, the format of its second cycle and the results of the first Rebuild Green Hackathon in 2024.
The experience of the first cycle became the foundation for developing a new model. It demonstrated that a team formed around a specific municipal challenge can continue to exist after the competition ends, while a concept created during the Hackathon can evolve into a pilot project, an international partnership or a consortium.
That is why, in 2026, Rebuild Green is structured as a much longer pathway:
challenge → interdisciplinary team → concept → pilot → acceleration → consortium → financing → implementation.
Within this model, Demo Day is not the final destination, but a potential starting point for the next stage in the life of a project.
From Challenge to Implementation: The International Framework of the Opening Day
The first substantive block of the opening was entitled From Challenge to Implementation. This was intentional: even before the seven municipal cases were presented, participants were invited to look at a recovery project not only as an architectural or engineering solution, but as a long-term system — involving people, governance, financing, responsibility and measurable outcomes.
Antonio Campagnoli: From PPP to 5P
Antonio Campagnoli, Immediate Past World President of FIABCI and Founder of IL PUNTO Real Estate Advisor, proposed expanding the traditional Public-Private Partnership model into the following formula:
Public — Private — People — Policy — Partnership.
At the centre of this approach are people.
A community should not be merely the end user of an already completed facility. People and local stakeholders should be included in the project itself and remain connected to it throughout its entire life cycle.
Using the example of a sports centre in Milan, Campagnoli demonstrated a model in which community stakeholders are integrated into the project’s governance structure. Therefore, the question for Rebuild Green teams is not only who will finance and build the facility, but also who will be responsible for its outcomes 10, 40 or 50 years from now.
This perspective is particularly important for Ukraine’s recovery, where the sustainability of a project will be determined not only by the quality of construction, but also by the community’s capacity to manage the asset created over the long term.
Peter Cuming: Place — Agency — Delivery
Peter Cuming, an Australian urban and regional planner, representative of the Habitat Professionals Forum and one of the contributors to the Recovering the Future approaches, proposed three interconnected concepts for the teams:
Place — Agency — Delivery.
Place means developing a deep understanding of a location — its history, ecology, culture, people, resources, risks and vulnerabilities.
Agency raises the question of who has a voice and who influences decisions. People should not be passive recipients of assistance, but agents of change.
Delivery translates the vision into practical terms: what will be implemented, by whom, with which resources, how it will operate after construction is completed, and how its outcomes will be evaluated.
One of the most important points in his presentation was that recovery cannot simply mean returning to the condition that existed before destruction. If reconstruction reproduces previous vulnerabilities, it also reproduces the risks of a future crisis.
A genuine recovery project must therefore simultaneously create infrastructure, knowledge, local capacity and resilience.
Cuming applied this framework directly to one of this year’s cases — the Mirotsky Lakes in the Bucha community. His question to the team effectively went beyond the task of improving the territory: what safe, inclusive and regenerative future can this project make possible for the community?
Nicolas Ziesel: “Today, There Are No Small Projects in Ukraine”
The next presentation demonstrated that this methodology has already produced practical results.
French architect Nicolas Ziesel, leader of BUDMO Team — the winning team of Rebuild Green Hackathon 2024 — explained what happened to their project after the first Hackathon ended.
The original concept envisioned a significantly larger educational and community centre using timber, straw, clay and low-tech sustainable technologies. After USAID funding was discontinued, the initial scale of the project became impossible to maintain.
But the team did not stop working — it reduced the scale and implemented a pilot.
The result was a small space by the river for learning, activities with internally displaced children and mothers, nature observation and birdwatching.
The construction process itself became part of the project’s social impact: the team provided training in working with natural materials, used local clay found approximately 300 metres from the site, and involved local workers and children.
BUDMO’s experience in Ukraine has already continued through other initiatives, including work on a small theatre space in Lviv for veterans associated with UNBROKEN.
For the teams of the second Hackathon, Nicolas formulated one of the strongest messages of the opening:
“Today, there are no small projects in Ukraine.”
The physical scale of a project does not determine its significance for the people whose lives it can change.
Thomas Dimov: From Toloka to a Potential Scale of CHF 100 Million
A second example of what can happen after a Hackathon was presented by Thomas Dimov, architect, ETH Zurich graduate, founder of the Swiss company Zoe Circular Building, and specialist in circular and bio-based construction.
His Toloka team was formed during Rebuild Green Hackathon 2024 from people who had hardly known one another before the programme began.
Today, Toloka is developing as Scalable Eco-Housing Districts for Industrial Parks in Ukraine — A Swiss-Ukrainian Model for Fast and Sustainable Recovery and Reconstruction.
Dimov presented a three-stage model:
pilot — CHF 500,000;cluster — CHF 10 million;neighbourhood — CHF 100 million.
For the pilot, the team is working on a financing pathway through the Swiss REPIC programme; opportunities under Horizon Europe / New European Bauhaus are being considered for the next stage; and scaling to the neighbourhood level envisages a separate investment and operating model.
At the heart of Toloka is the principle of radically using local resources. These include not only local construction materials, but also the knowledge, professional skills and potential of the people who live in the area or have found refuge there.
The model includes a demonstration building as an incubator, local production of geo- and bio-based building components, an on-site training centre, resilient technologies and circular building materials.
Thus, two projects from the first Hackathon already demonstrate different but equally important trajectories: from a competition concept to a built local pilot, and from a Hackathon team to an international consortium and a scalable financing model.
This experience became the foundation for the ambition of the second Rebuild Green cycle.
7 Real Challenges Across 6 Regions of Ukraine
Following the international block, the communities and challenge owners themselves took the floor.
This year, Rebuild Green is working with seven real challenges across six regions of Ukraine.
Bucha, Kyiv Region — Mirotsky Lakes
The Mirotsky Lakes: Accessible Recreation & Recovery challenge aims to create the first implementable phase of a territory combining rehabilitation, recreation, active leisure, accessibility and protection of the natural ecosystem.
Potential users include veterans, people affected by the war, internally displaced persons, families, older people and people with disabilities.
The preliminary estimate for the first phase presented during the opening is approximately UAH 87 million, although one of the team’s tasks will be to verify and refine this estimate.
Konotop, Sumy Region — Short-Stay Housing
Konotop is working on a model of dignified and adaptable short-stay housing for internally displaced persons and people who have suddenly lost their homes.
This is neither a long-term residential complex nor a separate clinical institution. It is intended to provide safe and dignified accommodation during a critical transitional period, integrated with the social and psychological services already available in the community.
The team will need to address capacity, the resident journey, architecture, universal accessibility, resilient energy and water systems, costs, procurement, financing, maintenance and the potential for replication.
Zhytomyr — A Strategy for 1,604 Apartment Buildings
Zhytomyr has 1,604 multi-apartment residential buildings, with a significant share of the problematic housing stock built between the 1960s and 1990s.
The city therefore needs more than a single standard renovation package. It needs an evidence-based decision framework that can help determine the most appropriate pathway for different building types: repair, deep renovation, reconstruction/redevelopment or, where no safe alternative exists, replacement.
The methodology developed should be tested on a specific pilot case and should consider not only technical condition, but also affordability, accessibility, public space, mobility, utilities, social infrastructure and long-term management.
Mykhailo-Lukashivska Community, Zaporizhzhia Region — Veteran Reintegration
This challenge focuses on creating a Veteran Reintegration Ecosystem for veterans and their families, including people living with the consequences of severe injuries, amputations and psychological trauma.
The concept deliberately moves away from the model of an isolated rehabilitation institution.
The team is expected to combine accessible housing, nature, professional support, education and opportunities for voluntary participation by veterans in community life and the local economy, creating a pathway to independence and community reconnection.
Lviv — Medical Waste Management System
The case of the First Medical Union of Lviv / UNBROKEN ecosystem operates at a very different scale.
The network includes 4 hospitals, 3 rehabilitation centres and outpatient facilities and serves more than 500,000 patients annually.
The volume of medical waste has increased from 5.17 tonnes in 2021 to approximately 50–60 tonnes in 2025.
The team will compare different operating models — outsourced, internally owned, shared regional and hybrid — and propose a safe, traceable, financially viable and crisis-resilient system with the potential to be scaled to other hospitals across Ukraine.
Boyarka, Kyiv Region — Amphitheatre as a Community Centre
The Boyarka community has more than 56,000 residents, over 7,000 internally displaced persons and approximately 1,700 veterans.
The abandoned amphitheatre in Victory Park has the potential to become more than a concert venue — it can become an everyday civic space for cultural and community life.
The team will need to address universal access, safety, the route to a shelter, sanitation, utilities, lighting, acoustics, seasonal use, space management and phased implementation.
Tereshky Community, Poltava Region — Emerald Scythia
The Emerald Scythia concept has the potential to connect 11 settlements, river landscapes and 49 archaeological sites into a cultural route.
However, the team is not expected to design everything at once.
The task is to identify one implementable first step: an anchor site and an initial route that can serve as the entry point to the future system.
In addition to architecture and landscape design, the team will need to address heritage protection, visitor scenarios, wayfinding, a local economic model and a mechanism for future scaling.
From Seven Challenges to Seven International Teams
Following the presentations by the communities, the practical phase of the Hackathon began — the formation of interdisciplinary teams around each challenge.
This part was facilitated by Kateryna Pylypchuk, Co-Founder of Rebuild Green 2030, Vice President of FIABCI-Ukraine and Strategist at Modulina Straw Panels, who is also a mentor of the Hackathon.
Participants were matched taking into account their professional experience, competencies, international backgrounds and motivation. The objective was to create a team around each challenge capable of examining the problem simultaneously from architectural, engineering, social, economic, financial and governance perspectives.
Participants met their teams and community representatives for the first time and began working together.
Thus, in a single day, seven municipal challenges were transformed into seven working interdisciplinary teams.
12 Mentors — Expertise to Move from Concept to Implementation
The teams received another important resource — 12 mentors from different professional fields.
Kateryna Kukharenko — Hackathon Mentor, Hackathon Coordinator and Grant Coordinator of Rebuild Green 2030 — introduced participants to her role in supporting interaction between the teams and communities and offered her expertise, including support for the further grant development of projects.
The mentoring group also includes Taras Tarasenko, Laurynas Marcinkus, Nicolas Ziesel, Thomas Dimov, Trond Olsen, Antin Kushnir, David Leal García, Sergiy Drach, Mykola Babak and Dmytro Tkachov.
Together, their expertise covers veteran policy, architecture and urban regeneration, public health and trauma-informed approaches, municipal governance, law, finance, investment and feasibility, emergency preparedness, circular and bio-based construction, engineering, grant development and implementation.
It is particularly significant that Nicolas Ziesel and Thomas Dimov have returned to Rebuild Green as mentors for the new cycle, sharing with the new teams their practical experience of developing projects beyond the Hackathon.
This creates another important Rebuild Green principle: knowledge generated during previous cycles remains within the ecosystem and is transferred to the next generation of teams.
What Comes Next
The Hackathon will continue for four weeks. Teams will work directly with communities, receive mentoring feedback and gradually transform their initial ideas into structured solutions with clearly identified beneficiaries, implementation models, partners and potential financing sources.
Teams are expected to submit their final materials by 29 October, followed by evaluation by the international jury on 30 October, with Demo Day taking place on 31 October.
For the strongest projects, the next stage will be acceleration, consortium building, the search for grant and investment financing, and preparation for implementation.
The winning project will receive an in-kind acceleration package with an indicative value of up to €50,000 — expert support for further project development and the preparation of a strong grant or financing application.
This is where the central objective of Rebuild Green 2030 lies: to create a bridge between a real need of a Ukrainian community and the international expertise, team, partnerships and financial instruments required to turn a solution into reality.
Rebuild Green Hackathon 2026 in Numbers
29 countries • around 100 experts, stakeholders and beneficiaries • 65+ selected participants • 7 real challenges • 6 regions of Ukraine • 7 international interdisciplinary teams • 12 mentors • 4 weeks of work • Demo Day on 31 October
Rebuild Green 2030 has set itself a goal that is simple to formulate but difficult to achieve: to make sure that strong ideas for Ukraine’s recovery do not end with a presentation — but gain a team, partners, financing and a real opportunity to be implemented.
Comments