Where is Serbian Civil Society Going?

Dear Neven,

Thanks for your warm welcome. You are one of the few understanding what we are trying to do. We belong to the same generation. European borders don’t make much sense to us.

Ben and I spent the last two days in Serbia in make-or-break meetings on our project here. Recalling the many challenges we’ve faced so far – suffocating levels of bureaucracy, rushed in partnerships and chips all over the shoulders of everyone – we were both a bit apprehensive.

It couldn’t have gone better! The list of complaints about the EU Delegation’s kafka-esque consultant-bureaucrats that we sent to our friends at the EC – and a couple of messages by Paul – had the desired effect. Both GOPA (the sub-contractor) and the EU Delegation officials were keen offering help.

As we left the Delegation we asked the official escorting is if they’d ever had such issues before. She said yes, projects had experienced challenges before, but she had never before received so many calls from senior colleagues in Brussels asking why the delegation was being nasty to a CSO (i.e. us).

Our cause was also helped by the fact that all of the project’s exchangees the Delegation had contacted reported very positive experiences. Thanks therefore to Sir Bubb for hosting one of the exchangees so well

The meeting with  our partners also went very well. They seem wholly focused on delivery now.

As if that wasn’t enough we also had very positive meetings with Banca Intesa Beograd, planning our strategic partnership to promote the financial inclusion of Serbian civil society (access to appropriate financial products and training on technical financial topics). The partnership will be announced at a press conference early next month.

The cherry on the cake was that we were able to meet the two titans of Serbian civil society – Miljenko Dereta and Sonya Licht and for the first time they both got excited about what our work.

After a long dry spell we now have a flood of good news from Serbia. Long may it last!