NEWSLETTER No. 2

LESKOVAC

This time we are going to present you with the activities of three organisations from our municipality.

“CULT” Grdelica, Association of Citizens “Porecje” Vucje, CeSID and, of course, the Educational Centre teams.

                “CULT” Grdelica, an NGO from a small town in the South Morava Region, is working on the project "Local NGO radio”. It concerns a radio broadcast on civil society and the NGO CULT CLUB, the project supported by BCIF from London. Actually, this organisation whose mission is the civil community development, started a project relating to the media coverage of NGO activities in the Municipality. The President of this organisation’s Managing Board, Ninoslav Stankovic – NINE, a true NGO hero, managed to win a project for his small town that even much bigger towns than Grdelica would like to have got. It is unfortunate that the radio frequency range is limited and it can only be listened to by Grdelica and its surroundings. However, the information quality and professionalism it provides largely compensate for the low range capacity. 

                Apart from this project, CULT has produced an analysis on the condition of utility infrastructure and proposals for the investment in its reconstruction and improvement. This analysis has been presented to the European Commission Office in Yugoslavia and to USAID.

                “CULT” has thus become the NGO corner stone in Grdelica Region! 

                Association of Citizens “Porecje” from Vucje is an organisation that has existed for only two years, and has had such actions that even the national NGOs would be proud of!!!

                This small town at the foot of the mountain Kukavica hosts one of the most active ecological  NGOs in this region. Zoran Zivkvic, President of “Porecje”, the man classified by  CRNPS as one of the best volunteers of Serbia, has been running this humane group of people for two years and during that time and at his own expense Zoki has managed to get tractor drivers and workers organised, to animate local entrepreneurs and businessmen to materially and financially support the extensive works of cleaning the local mountain river. In fact, the activists and volunteers of this organisation started their tractors and lorries, mattocks and shovels and restored the natural gloss of their pearly river.

The action has become so popular that now this organisation has trouble hiring all the volunteers that seem to be sprouting up. The action “Let’s preserve the mountain and the river” grew into a real project and in the end, Zoki managed to include the international development organisation CHF in providing contribution to saving the winding cascading mountain pearl, the river Vucjanka! This programme covers the entire watershed of the mountain river Vucjanka. 

CeSID Leskovac has started the project (on national level) of monitoring the local self-management in the territory of the municipalities Leskovac, Bojnik, Crna Trava and Vlasotince. The project has been vested in the CeSID activist Milan Mijovic – MIXA. CeSID has ended the preparations for the monitoring of the local elections in Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac. CeSID plans to engage about 300 volunteers from the area of Vranje, Leskovac, Presevo, Bujanovac and Medvedja. The Electoral Press Centre will be at the CeSID premises and in Leskovac.

Educational Centre - TEAMS 

Spending a weekend in the surroundings of Pracine? We do not miss it. Especially if the occasion is the Grza Summer Camp 2002. And not to mention the quality time spent in educational, creative and recreational workshops. At some point, the creative workshop participants were given water colours and paintbrushes and the recreational workshop participants even a ball, so that we can take our colleague’s word that he had a great time. The Camp was organised by the Government of Serbia, this time, in cooperation with several Ministries.

                What are we presently working on? Valentina, Daca, Ivica and Zeljko, that is – the Development Team, together with CHF, are working on a sustainability study. It concerns development programmes for private entrepreneurs. We are preparing the final part of the project "From embargo towards integration". Within the project, there have been several seminars for the past ten months for small-scale businessmen in Leskovac, Pirot (in cooperation with Pirgos), and Zajecar (with the Timok Club). In cooperation with CHF we have organised lump sum financial assistance workshops for the local businessmen.

| Kragujevac | Smederevska Palanka | Paracin | Kucevo | Kraljevo | Uzice | Pozega | Knjazevac | Nis | Leskovac | Pirot |