"One big family" is not an advertising slogan
How the IDC community works: why parents become friends as families, children cheer each other on, and the centre has become a support through difficult times.
These words appear often in our reviews, and we treasure them, because we built this atmosphere deliberately — from day one. You can feel it in everything: from the administrator who greets you at the door to the tone of the messages in the group chats. We want children and parents to feel supported here, to feel warmth and kindness — an atmosphere that inspires.
Cheering, not competing
At competitions our children often perform in the same category — against each other. And that is exactly why we specifically teach them to cheer each other on rather than compete. Our teachers show it by their own example. One person wins the medal, but it is a team that goes home.
A community wider than the centre
Children who train professionally, and their parents, spend a lot of time at the centre — and they become friends. They go to each other's birthdays, travel abroad to competitions together. "We live from competition to competition" is how the families themselves describe it: the trips, the cities, the stages, the shared victories and shared impressions.
There is a separate value in the time parents spend with their children. In a world where everyone has a device in their hand, a trip to a competition together or an evening at the showcase is exactly the kind of real shared time everyone is short of.
A support in difficult times
Covid, war, air-raid alerts and power cuts — through all of it the centre remained a place with a timetable, friends and a reason to keep going. Parents say the classes and the community give them and their children psychological support: when there is somewhere to come and someone to cheer for, there is strength to live, to work and to fight.
Why it works
We guard this atmosphere as carefully as we choose our teachers: values for us are not a slide in a presentation but a filter in decisions. We would rather part with someone who does not share them than destroy something built over years.
The best way to feel the atmosphere is to come and visit. A first class is UAH 300, and after that perhaps your family will be calling us "our big family" too.
Read also: "I feel at home here" — the service you never see: stories from reception through the staff's eyes.
Read also: "Senior teacher: the work parents never see" — what the IDC team's invisible labour consists of.