This Country Needs Its Youth

Serbia's "Lost Generation" demands to be heard

A group of college students gathered on a busy square in Belgrade—lugging suitcases. Across Serbia, other young people did the same, dragging packed suitcases behind them to crowded public places. Their point? That Serbian institutions must address the needs of its youth or risk losing them to other countries forever.

For young people growing up in Serbia today, especially outside Belgrade, the future can look decidedly grim. Chronic and severe unemployment (70% among young people) only exacerbate young people's boredom, drug use, dissatisfaction, and the desire to leave their towns and Serbia behind altogether. And while many hoped for opportunities to travel to the rest of Europe once the Milosevic era was over, they have instead found both visas and money for travel exceedingly difficult to come by—over 75% of young people in Serbia have never left the country. The result is that young Serbians are isolated from the rest of Europe and either see the West as a paradise to escape to or as an arbiter penalizing Serbia for its wrongs.

"Young people are divided, and many under-20s are very radical," Dragan Popovic of Serbia's Youth Initiative for Human Rights told the Guardian. "They are sick of the lack of jobs and prospects in this country and are angry with the EU and the conditions it places on membership. Also, they don't really remember how bad things were in the 1990s." Jelena Kolasinac, a 19-year-old student in Belgrade, told the Associated Press, "I feel I am being punished for something I haven't done."

ISC wanted to help stem the increasing disillusionment of this generation and instead help grow a new generation of leaders for Serbia. So, in 2002, with funding from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, we teamed up with Civic Initiatives, a Serbian nonprofit, and YouthBuild International to develop our youth and social action approach that would help young people in 20 communities build critical leadership skills and bring about positive while changing their own and others' perceptions of what they could accomplish. In Aleksinac, for example, young people launched a film series to prompt open conversation about issues facing the community, such as drug use and HIV/AIDS. In Bor, the youth group held concerts and puppet shows that raised money from 800 people to provide equipment and toys to a local hospital. Today, the youth and social action approach has become a core component of Civic Initiatives' national youth program.

But to make these grassroots actions sustainable, we knew that a national policy would have to be developed to specifically address the needs of young people. And so ISC and Civic Initiatives began working with the Youth Coalition of Serbia to help them become a stronger organization that could advocate on behalf of young people and, ultimately, see their needs represented in the national government.

ISC and Civic Initiatives began by supporting the Youth Coalition's launching of bottom-up campaigns in 20 communities, where youth groups worked with local nonprofits and political party branches to form a common agenda around the needs of youth and showed a documentary film, State of EXIT, that told the story of two young people jailed under Milosevic who started a music festival that grew into one of Europe's main music events —inspiring many more young people to get involved.

As the local efforts gained momentum, ISC and the Youth Coalition brought these groups together to plan for and launch a national campaign that would result in a national youth agency—a prerequisite for the ultimate goal of a national youth policy. In the spring and summer of 2006, coalition members used a number of increasingly creative means to gain support and momentum. The Suitcases event demonstrated how young people had little to look forward to at home and a "Shadow Ministry of Youth" collected signatures from mayors and youth leaders urging the national government to develop a youth action plan. The Youth Coalition created a movie called "They promised…" which profiled the promises of politicians to youth. And coalition members made national news by telephoning various ministries and the prime minister’s office asking for the Office for Youth.

The campaigns worked. The Youth Coalition secured meetings with government officials and political parties and reached consensus that a youth ministry should be established. In May 2007, the Serbian Ministry of Youth and Sport was born. Since then, ISC, Civic Initiatives, and the Youth Coalition—which has grown to include 187 organizations across Serbia—are working with the Ministry to establish a national youth umbrella organization, a national youth strategy, and municipal youth offices across the nation as part of our nationwide civil society in Serbia. We are working with the Ministry to provide capacity building to 30 regional youth centers and initiate a process to gain public input to the national policy.

While putting the national youth strategy in place is just the beginning, we have seen young people in Serbia stand up and demand to play a role in their country’s future. What has been called the "Lost Generation" is steadily showing that it is also Serbia’s next generation of leaders.