A kick-off training for civil society organizations will be organized in Belgrade from May 11 to 13 as part of the Active Citizens: Better Society project supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and implemented by the Belgrade Open School (BOŠ) in cooperation with The BFPE Foundation for Responsible Society and the Balkan Research Network (BIRN). This project was launched in November 2018 and aims to improve the practice of public advocacy in civil society, representing the interests of local communities and active involvement of citizens in the work of civil society organizations. This year, the emphasis was also on training CSOs to cooperate with the business sector.
During the training, representatives of organizations will have the opportunity to get acquainted in an interactive way with the basics of public advocacy, as well as with the rules and obligations in the field of communication and branding of advocacy initiatives. Then, the focus will be on mastering the financial way of reporting and identifying the needs of project initiatives. Finally, CSO representatives will go through a cycle of design thinking. Design thinking is a process of creative problem solving in which people of different perspectives, knowledge, skills and experience are targeted, and who then work together on the problem in order to reach an applicable and socially usable solution. By applying the approach of design thinking, advocacy activists learn to be deeply informed about the problems of the target group for whose rights or needs advocacy is performed, all with the application of empathy and understanding.
