Authentic Activism
Group “Let’s…” began collaborating with the Olof Palme International Center in 2006. The program developed during this ten-year cooperation is internally referred to as the “Olof Program,” and focuses on supporting civil society organizations and encouraging youth, informal groups, and youth initiatives to become active and create change in their local communities. At the core of this program is a belief in authentic activism—the idea that activism is only real if it originates from within ourselves, and that change can only begin from that place.
At the very beginning, we carried out the project Know-Participate, through which we attempted to connect youth from two local communities (Leskovac and Kragujevac) with municipal representatives and decision-makers, in order to facilitate advocacy for their rights. Following that, through the project Youth Offices – Pillars of Active Citizenship and Youth Participation, we tried to develop a set of recommendations and inform local governments about the importance and quality standards of Youth Offices. The aim of this project was to develop a model for local Youth Offices in an institutional and long-term way—supporting active citizenship and implementing the National Youth Policy at the local level. In this way, young people would be empowered to actively participate in the development of their local communities, while local authorities would be encouraged to become more open and responsive to the needs, issues, and actions of young people.
At that time, there were only a few Youth Offices in Serbia. At the end of the project, we published the guide On a First-Name Basis with the Youth Office (see PUBLICATIONS), which served as a helpful resource for local communities in establishing Youth Offices.
The next step was setting standards for the development of Local Action Plans for Youth. The goal of this project was to build internal capacities of local Youth Offices and to empower those interested in leading the process of developing local action plans for youth. The project offered concrete steps for implementing youth policy at the local level, supporting newly established Youth Offices and helping them create local action plans. Through this project, Group “Let’s…” promoted the practice of active participation of Youth Offices in decision-making processes, as well as youth policy development based on facts, research, and public opinion. Municipalities supported through this project included Obrenovac, Prijepolje, Požarevac, and Savski venac.
In the following project, we supported Youth Offices that had developed or adopted local youth action plans through intensive training programs tailored to the needs and capacities of Youth Office representatives and their local collaborators (e.g. institutions, local NGOs, and informal groups working with youth). At the end of the project, we created a manual titled On a First-Name Basis with the Local Youth Office and Youth Plan, which served as a second edition of the previously created manual, with an additional section addressing youth action plans.
Further work within this program continued through the project Non-formal Education in Youth Offices – A Tool for Sustainable Implementation of Youth Policy in Serbia, which aimed to support a new generation of facilitators from across Serbia engaged in local Youth Offices, youth organizations, or institutions working with youth. They were empowered to design, implement, and evaluate non-formal education activities within youth work, using appropriate methodologies.
In 2012, through the project Initiative for Promoting Authentic Activism through Support for Increased Responsibility of Civil Society Organizations in Serbia and Support for New and Fresh Youth Initiatives, we sought to empower youth, informal groups, and local initiatives to create change—especially given that collaboration with local authorities only worked until party interests got involved. That year marked a shift in our work—pursuing the same goals, but in a way that, for us, was more effective and longer-lasting. The general goal was to support new local youth initiatives and authentic local activism as the main drivers of youth policy implementation and the establishment of new civil society organizations and/or local movements. At the end of the project, the publication GPS for Activism was developed (see PUBLICATIONS).
Within this project, we tried to “shake up” civil society a bit and organized the conference Why Has the Civil Sector Gone to… and How Did I Contribute?. The aim of the two-day conference was to network organizations and collectively reflect on the state of civil society. Participants included representatives of civil society organizations, international organizations, and governmental institutions.
The next step was a series of about ten trainings titled Values and Organizational Management, aimed at representatives of civil society organizations or informal groups who were ready to learn more about values and value-based management. The trainings introduced participants to skills in value-based management, helped raise awareness of personal values and reasons for engagement in the civil sector, increased understanding of ethical organizational management and civic society values such as transparency, accountability, solidarity, and equal opportunities, and introduced specific tools for promoting these values internally within organizations (such as involving participants in planning, report writing, transparency mechanisms, etc.). Over 200 participants from civil society organizations reflected on values and tried to answer the question: “What am I doing in the civil sector?”
The most recent creative response to events in the civil society around us has been the training How Much Do I Cost?, which has since become a program and has been implemented continuously for around ten years.
This seven-day training is intended for representatives of civil society organizations or informal groups, and aims to empower them to use performance skills or short video clips (recorded with mobile phones or other simple equipment) to draw attention to problems in society, as well as to negative phenomena observed in the civil sector itself. Participants reflect on civil courage, (self)censorship, ethics, fascism, extremism, power dynamics, corruption, activism, personal values—and at the end of the process, they present short films and performances in public events across various cities in Serbia.