Serbia: Civil Society & Inclusive Governance

At the beginning of 2020, PIN launched a new project in Kosovo and Serbia, in partnership with the Peaceful Change initiative, Gradjanske Inicijative, Peer Educators Network, and Aktiv, to ensure that residents in both places are better able to empathise with one another’s perspectives, play active civic roles in society, and celebrate diversity. PIN and its partners will carry out activities designed to enable non-majority communities in Serbia and Kosovo to more effectively advocate for the local-level services to which they are entitled, as well as to strengthen participatory approaches to local service delivery to enhance inclusivity and partnership between civil society and municipalities. To these ends, PIN and its partners will provide capacity-building for grassroots civil society organizations, engage young people in cross-community activities, conduct awareness-raising campaigns, and provide grants for local-level organizations and institutions to improve service delivery and inter-community cooperation.

“Amplifying Local Voices for Equitable Development” (ALVED) is a British government-funded project running from September 2020 through March 2023. The project is implemented in five municipalities in Kosovo and four in Serbia by a consortium made up of Peaceful Change initiative (PCi), a UK-registered charity, People in Need, and NGO Aktiv and Peer Educators Network (PEN), two Kosovo-based civil society organizations. The overriding objective of the project is to ensure that citizens in Kosovo are better able to empathise with one another’s perspectives, play active civic roles in society, and celebrate diversity. Through a focus on participatory social service planning, the project engages the expertise of the project consortium members with civil society and municipal representatives to ensure that high-quality social services are available to all. Grassroots civil society actors are offered capacity-building opportunities as well as funding for local initiatives that aim to improve cooperation between local authorities and residents. This project also pays special attention to the needs and concerns of young people, focusing on harnessing the potential of this vital demographic by investing in the development of knowledge and skills relevant for effectively engaging with their communities.

In Serbia and Kosovo, PIN promotes new approaches to raising human rights awareness among teachers and students using documentary films as an educational tool. PIN receives support from the National Endowment Fund for Democracy and together with local partners, works to educate university students intending to become teachers on how to incorporate documentary films and post-screening discussions into education in order to tackle controversial topics and promote human rights awareness.

PIN and its local partner Fund B92 in Serbia work with professors from the University of Belgrade’s Philosophy Department to develop practical guidance for other professors and teachers who are interested in adopting this approach or teaching the approach to others. In 2018, we aim to expand the pilot course to at least three other departments in universities across Serbia.

This approach to human rights awareness stems from PIN’s “One World in Schools” programme (www.oneworldinschools.cz), which uses documentary films and other audio-visual materials to educate students from elementary schools to universities on human rights and democracy. Built on the success and experience of the One World Film Festival, currently the largest human rights film festival in Europe, PIN has developed educational modules with documentary films and accompanying materials to help teachers educate their students about tolerance and respect for the rights of others, which are essential values and principles for a democratic society. In the Czech Republic, this educational programme has been implemented for more than a decade. The materials are currently used by teachers in over 3,000 primary and secondary schools throughout the country. In 2009, this groundbreaking methodology was piloted in Lebanon. That year, One World in Schools received the World Aware Education Award from the Council of Europe, in recognition for excellence in networking, partnership, and coordination for increased and improved global education. Since 2010, One World in Schools has implemented similar projects in Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Georgia, Armenia, and Mongolia.

Within the effort of integration of persons with disabilities into society, People in Need supported the transformation of the residential institution for people with intellectual disabilities in Veliki Popovac. In cooperation with the Centre for Support of the Transformation, PIN arranged a set of educative workshops. During these workshops, the residential institution staff was provided with the information about the methods of individual planning and individual assistance service, as well as with the experience from transformation process in the Czech Republic. As the results of the workshops, the staff has mapped needs of 190 clients, and they have started to create the individual plans together with the clients. People in Need supported 20 people with intellectual disabilities who moved out of the residential institution, and began to use three newly established services in the community. The clients also joined the non-formal education; they had the possibility to choose from a variety of courses such as: literacy classes, a course for cleaning ladies, a course of handiwork, a course for the hairdressers’ assistants, etc. The newly gained knowledge helped them to find employment. Out of these 20 clients, seven of them have already got a job, and two of them are active as volunteers in the local community. People in Need put strong attention on supporting people who attempt to re-gain the legal capacity. In most cases people were deprived of the legal capacity while entering the residential institution, which means that they couldn’t decide about their own life at the time. Within the cooperation with the residential institution in Veliki Popovac, the documentary movie and methodical booklet were created and now help other residential institutions in Serbia as a handbook while establishing the independent living services.