This year we celebrate our 3-year anniversary!
We started with the #flood of optimism, then we opened a #Community center for the youth, and today we have two #local funds from which we finance community initiatives.
Thank you for supporting our work, we can do even more together.
HOW IT ALL STARTED?
Obrenovac Youth Foundation (OYF) is a community foundation, risen as an urgent grassroots movement in an aftermath of May 2014 floods. OYF was established by a dozen young activists in June 2014, and within a couple of months – it became a major network volunteers, and dozens of partner organizations from all over Serbia and Europe.
The story of OYF started with great optimism! Obrenovac would have not recovered after the floods if there weren’t the activism and enthusiasm of young people. And we have come a long way – from an organization that provided humanitarian aid, organized numerous volunteer actions, and summer workshops for children, until we managed to open a first ever Community center for youth in Obrenovac. And we are very proud of all our volunteers, neighbors, friends and donors who helped us contribute to the recovery of Obrenovac.
OUR MISSION AND VISION
OUR vision is that every person in our community is an active citizen, empowered to contribute to making our community a better place to live. Or simply said, we want Obrenovac to be a great place to live!
OUR mission is to provide opportunities for active citizens to organize, learn and network, so their future initiatives make our community grow.
HOW DO WE INVEST IN OUR COMMUNITY?
After three years and dozens of different projects that we implemented through the Community center for children and youth – we decided to focus more on building long-term community programs. We want to make sure that the young people in the next 50 years (and why not, the next 100 years!) have the opportunity to make their ideas a reality! That is why we decided to further develop programs in following areas:
★ Providing support to initiatives of active citizens in the community – because maybe it is a new basketball court, open-air gallery or a puppet theater that our neighbors think that’ really important, and we plan to support them
★ Promotion of local philanthropy & building the community spirit – so that we are all proud of our city, and that we constantly work for it to become a better place to live
★ Strengthening and developing OYF as a community foundation – in order to provide greater support for our community, and local initiatives by our fellow citizens
Today, we focus our work primarily on the people from the community of the municipality of Obrenovac, Serbia. We have established two funds through which we directly support local initiatives initiated by our fellow citizens: Youth Fund and Neighborhood Initiatives Fund. It is our goal that in the next 5 years, we expand some of our programs on neighboring cities in the region of central and western Serbia.
WE ARE VERY PROUD OF OUR RESULTS!
And we are happy to share some of our greatest accomplishments with you:
- We engaged more than 4,000 citizens in our programs and projects implemented in the community
- We fundraised more than 250,000 EUR for community rebuilding projects, humanitarian assistance, youth projects and Community center
- We opened a first (ever) Community Center for children and youth in Obrenovac, where dozens of new projects and youth initiatives were implemented
- We piloted new concepts and platforms for community organizing, including: Community Market, Community School for activisms, Pop-up theatre, OYF reading room
- We promoted voluntarism on local, national and international level. We hosted one Slovakian volunteer for 4 months within European Voluntary service program
- We networked with other community foundations from Serbia and the region (Bosnia & Herzegovina, Romania, Croatia, Czech Republic)
- Our donors are local and national businesses, foundations, CSOs and individuals
Through a wide network of our local, national and regional partners, we are actively seeking for opportunities to spread the word on the importance of community activism and community development.