Effective Activism in Slovenia – A Bilateral Exchange of Croatian and Slovenian Activists
The Effective Activism Project is an initiative that aims to empower individual activists and organizations which defend open society values with novel methods that can overcome the limitations of the generation of well-established NGOs. The project targets groups and individuals, including youth, those based outside capital cities, and progressive movements and voices. In 2014, the initial efforts focus on five countries: Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia, as well as the connection between activists in these countries and successful groups in countries such as Britain, Italy, Poland and Spain.
Results
The Effective Activism event in Slovenia enables the mutual exchange of knowledge, experiences and ideas among the activists from Slovenia and Croatia (and also from Bosnia and Hergezovina, Serbia, Spain and Iceland). The event was in Maribor (November 07-08) and it enabled all the involved activists to benefit and learn more about other experiences. The event focused on the topics of transformative power of protests, labor’ rights, conservative threats towards open society, and citizens’ co-management of public affairs/public goods. The innovative approach was that this project encouraged the activists from both countries to think about and give the suggestions of the invited lecturers/experts from whom they think they would benefit most. The participants at the event were therefore actively participate at the design, content and structure of the event itself in order to make it less hierarchical than such events usually are.
Organizational board: Neža Kogovšek Šalamon, Lana Zdravković and Mojca Frelih from the Peace Institute, and Tin Gazivoda, Renata Ćuk and Peter Matjašič from Open Society Initiative for Europe (OSIFE).