Development of Philanthropy - CELEBRATING SOLIDARITY

Time frame: October 2016 – September 2017

About the project

Project Celebrating solidarity aims to explore, stimulate debate and advance solidarity as a crucial topic within European societies and was organized by Ana and Vlade Divac Foundation with following project partners - RadioKit Foundation (Poland), DemNet (Hungary), Multi Kulti Collective (Bulgaria), MladiInfo International (Macedonia), Partners Albania (Albania) and Ana and Vlade Divac Foundation (Serbia). All those countries have long and turbulent history of facing crisis, both man-made (political, social, armed conflicts, etc), as well as the natural disasters (such as earthquakes, floods, etc).

Project was exploring variety of turbulent times those countries and their citizens were facing, while celebrating and understanding the importance of solidarity and love to other human being in a word of conflicts and disasters. During one year (2016-2017), and across six countries, partners have directly involved 26.856 individuals, both young and elderly, volunteers and professionals, in exploring the issue of solidarity, channels and mechanisms of European solidarity, as well as responsibility, and common solutions.

While exploring attitude of citizens about important social value of solidarity, special attention was aimed to youth population - over 7.000 youth shared their opinions on solidarity by online quiz and 12 focus groups. Results were encouraging, most of youth in all 6 countries is recognizing suffering of other people and have positive and proactive attitude.

Development of virtual museum of solidarity attracted over 732.000 page views and provided huge audience and possibility to share of 27 edited stories of solidarity from 6 countries and many other content and information. We have interviewed various people who shared their stories and presented many examples of solidarity and inspirational stories of supporting people.

Trough Solidarity festivals in Serbia, Macedonia, Albania and Bulgaria organized in period May-June 2017, we have directly promoted this important social value and involved over 26.000 participants and hundreds of thousands were indirectly involved or reached by the media reports and social network engagement. Many public events have been organized in all 4 countries and they attracted huge number of citizens. Those events were organized also by partnering with other public events and creating higher impact in promotion of solidarity in their societies.

Media support helped us achieve indirect reach to at least 572.427 citizens across partner countries who were informed about the project through media reports and project web site.

By the end of the project, we have organized international conference “Solidarity in time of crisis” during which we have promoted project results, but also involved representatives of the media and individual philanthropists who all shared their perspective on solidarity and discussed importance of media support and individual endeavor as catalyst for the solidarity in our societies. Participation of Serbian national media representatives and guests - journalists from Albania and Macedonia offered opportunity to learn about media approach toward solidarity and their importance for awareness raising and involvement of the citizens and companies into concrete actions.

Links for interesting project content: