‘How To’: Organize on a Zero Budget

• Are you leading or looking to lead a campaign or organizing project that lacks a sustainable budget?

We kick off our ‘How To’ series on Thursday 25th September from 10am-11:00am US East Coast time exploring how we build power for social change on limited resources.

Joining us to share how to do it will be Marina Pavlic and Savo Manojlovic from Serbia on the Move.

Since 2017, Serbia on the Move has operated with a limited or no budget for staffing, offices and campaigns, but that hasn’t stopped them.

Not only have they maintained their momentum, they’re having an impact at a national level.

Marina and Savo will share how they built an army of volunteers across the country to drive forward their campaigns, including their recent campaign “In the Name of Culture”. Most recently the campaign gathered 40,000 signatures across the country in just seven days forcing a national debate on the campaign in Parliament.

We’ll go behind the scenes to learn:

• how they recruited and organized volunteers to lead campaigns and stay engaged beyond them;
• the challenges they faced doing this with limited resources and how they solved them;
• how they created momentum on the ground and involved more than 40 local communities in the process.

Click here to register for free.

About Serbia on the Move

Serbia on the Move (SoM) is a national organizing and change-making nonprofit with a mission of creating a strong and responsible civil society by motivating individuals to actively participate in creating changes that will make their lives better.

Up to now, SoM has implemented more than 10 national community organizing campaigns in areas of anti-corruption, healthcare, labor rights of women, environmental protection etc. This has resulted in social change including fairer maternity leave for hundreds of thousands of families and greater transparency and accountability across government – particularly in the health sector.

Unfortunately, in 2017 their unstable funding collapsed.

Facing the need for more organizing and leadership on critical issues in Serbia, they had no option but to keep going.

Their secret to overcoming the challenge? People power! Since 2017 Serbia on the Move has been successfully recruiting and supporting teams of volunteers that have led to them continuing what they are known for – enabling change!

Meet your speakers Marina & Savo

Marina Pavlic – President (SoM)

Marina Pavlic graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy, but social challenges in Serbia led her to organizing. In 2009 she found in Serbia on the Move people who had grown tired of waiting for changes to happen by themselves. She also discovered Marshall’s Ganz methodology for creating change. Since then she has been passionate about helping leaders become change agents. Marina is responsible for leading the organization on the national level and for two consecutive years she was a Teaching Fellow for the Harvard Kennedy School’s Leadership, Organizing and Action online course.

Savo Manojlovic – Lead Organizer (SoM)

Savo Manojlovic is an organizer, a lawyer and a researcher in an academic institute. He led five campaigns, spoke at over 20 protests (once in front of more than 50.000 people), open 9 cases at Constitutional court, wrote one law and one bill, blocked one illegal election of judges and prosecutors, took part in collecting more than 40.000 for one new bill. People and justice drive him. Fun fact: his name means justice in Hebrew.

Photo credit: Serbia on the Move take their campaign “In the Name of Culture” to Serbia’s Parliament in Belgrade on 30 August, 2019.