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Youth Coalition of Serbia

Youth Coalition of Serbia was founded by eight youth national organizations: Gradjanske inicijative (Civic Initiatives), Studentska unija Srbije (Student Union of Serbia), JAZAS, Omladinski informativni centar (Youth Informative Center), Izvidaci Srbije (Reconnoitres of Serbia), Mladi istraživaci (Young Researchers), Omladinski savet Vojvodine ( The Youth Council of Vojvodina) and Omladinski savet Srbije (The youth Council of Serbia).

The Coalition is organized with the goal of organizing campaign for advocating for youth topics and matters on both local and national level.
Objective of this campaign is forming a body for youth strategy on both mentioned levels.

Aware that quality national youth strategy has to be initiated from the local level, in the beginning, we have put the accent on local advocacy campaigns. In that context, new project which will start with its realization in December, 2004, has been created. The project is consisted of realization of advocacy campaigns in seven pilot-municipalities. New bill of law on local authorities which gives municipalities the right to form their parts of budget intended to youth is a thing which will make the situation easier. Another positive circumstance is that local authorities have the right to form official bodies for youth according to the same bill.

The first faze of the programme will be a training of trainers dealing with topics of advocacy, adjusted to this campaign. Representatives of organizations comprised in the Coalition will attend the training. After that, in above mentioned seven towns, there will be trainings organized on advocacy for the representatives of all active youth organizations in these cities.

Next faze is putting through campaign itself, which will be realized by activists of youth organizations on local level, with the full support of Youth Coalition of Serbia.

The goal of the campaign is constitution of the youth body within the municipality. The body would get certain authority and budgets, and it would be a sort of support to various youth initiatives. As well as that it would be used for advocacy of youth in the bodies of municipality. Depending on possibility of a certain municipality, the goal of the campaign would be getting space for running different types of youth initiatives (youth tenements, etc.)

According to experience from seven above mentioned pilot-municipalities, campaign would further expand and aggrandize to new towns. During all this time, we will be working on networking of local initiatives until the moment of reaching the "critical point", when we will start advocacy campaign on a national level.

The goal of the campaign on national level will be forming of a functional youth body at the government, which will, together with the local youth initiatives, start making national strategy for youth. This strategy would be a document that determines relation of state administration and youth, strategy of the state for the youth, long-term youth policy goals in Serbia...

One of the preconditions for entering European Union is that the state has formed Youth Agency, as well as having definite youth policy, which, in this case, is soothing to degree to which state finds it a necessity to fulfil conditions for entering European Union.

Apart from this foreseen strategy, the Coalition will help in realization of local campaigns which are agitated by young people in municipalities.