Forum for creative action

Forum for creative action was founded in 2010, operating with limited capacity for some time and and then in 2014, began working with full capacity, when a group of young people, initiated set of youth related actions establishing strong identity in the community. Our work is based on three programs and main goals : 1 .to provide information and informal education to young people, 2. to facilitate greater involvement in decision making processes, 3. to provide support to youth entrepreneurship. Our target group is are young people from 15 to 30 years of age in the area of South-Western Serbia. Our organization is located in the City of Novi Pazar, in the area often reffeered to as Sandzak. Novi Pazar is a city where, according to national census from 2011, has over 60% of inhabitants younger than 30 years of age,, so there is always youth ready for activism and volunteering. At the very beginning of our work we implanted program under the tittle “FOKRED youth winter and summer schools”. Over 100 young people took part in these two schools, most of them high school students. Topics that were taught during these set of seminars were: team, teamwork, organization, verbal and non-verbal communication, elements of communication, mediation, stereotypes. These activities were mainly implemented in the workshop format. So far, our biggest project is called “ECO ACTION”, which was funded by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and main goals of the project was to develop a mechanism for active involvement of citizens in resolving environmental problems in the city, by means of Android apps and web site. The application and web-site provide overview of environmental problems reported by users, as well as those which have been resolved. The application is available for download on Google Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=rs.ecoaction. In late August 2015 FOKRED signed a protocol on cooperation with the CSO Youth Ambassadors from Nis. After that, in Novi Pazar, 50 young people were selected to act as ambassadors of culture. This project is supported by all cultural institutions in Novi Pazar, as well as the city itself. Youth Ambassadors are students and high school students and they have term of one year. They will have educative workshops and will participate in various cultural events in the city, also in their organization. One of the best examples for these two months of the mandate of ambassadors is concert of Djordje Balasevic in Novi Pazar, where Young Ambassadors of Culture participated in the organization of this event. The project is still in progress. Also every last Saturday of the month we have the activity called “Active Saturday” where our volunteers organize literary evenings with different themes, celebrating the day kindness, human tolerance, Poetry Day, a day of people with Down syndrome, observing "Bloody moon," action "Know your city" , training on extremism, prevention of drug debate, as well as flash mob to mark the World Earth Day. The video that we filmed on the occasion of tolerance can be seen at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nrYf93CSFU FOKRED, through all its projects and activities, given that it operates in a multi-ethnic environment, involved young people who come from different social categories, the different religious and ethnic affiliation. In fact all of our activities are aimed at establishing cooperation among the youth of the Bosniak, Serbian, Albanian and Roma. In this way we have gained experience in working with vulnerable young groups and successfully carried out a number of workshops that were attended by over 100 youth. We have developed intercultural dialogue. And all of our workshops, actions and training are design so that different nations can involve and cooperate together. In our team we have ten active members and over 40 volunteers who are always available to us, and we are always ready to welcome new people and volunteers in our projects and actions.