Opis organizácie

ZOS (Zelena Omladina Srbije/ Serbian Green Youth) is a non-governmental, non-profit youth organization established in Belgrade, Serbia. The organisation has been active for almost twenty years and organised hundreds of seminars, trainings, workshops, street actions and festivals nationally and internationally. The main values organisation stands for are ecological wisdom, sustainability, social justice, democracy and nonviolence. ZOS's activities focus on improvement of human rights, women, workers and minority rights, environmental protection and climate change and empowering underprivileged and disadvantaged groups and communities. Our main target groups are young people and discriminated groups, such as national minorities, women, refugees, and LGBTQ+ community. We reach out to them trough educational activities such as seminars, workshops, trainings as well as public debates and conferences, direct actions and public policy discussions on both national and international level. The activities we organise are mostly based on non-formal education principles and reflect our values in terms of inclusion of everyone who has a will to get involved. In order to bring our ideas closer to wider public in Serbia, for a few years we have been running a blog with a couple of thousand of readers - Okvir (Frame). Critical articles about issues concerning young people and the society in general are published on the blog at least once or twice a month.

International work is an important aspect of our functioning and plays a crucial role in of our general work. Our members have been for years bringing their experience from international educational events back to the organisation and our methodology is influenced by different practices we learned from our fellow young greens and other young people from all over Europe. There are very strong ties between ZOS and its Network - Cooperation and Development Network Eastern Europe (CDN) - a capacity-building network of youth organisations committed to the development and implementation of Green ideas in Eastern Europe. CDN gathers 18 member and 6 partner organisations – ­ youth wings of Green parties and NGOs whose work is rooted in Green values, including ZOS. Green Youth offices are shared with CDN. Our members have been in CDN's Board, Secretariat and preparatory teams of educational activities since the Network's establishment. For these reasons, along with ZOS being one of the Network's funders, the close cooperation between the two organisations resulted in many international activities organised jointly for many years.

Our activities are a reaction to the current issues in the society that our members felt a need to react upon. So, in the last couple of years our focus has been changing directions over certain periods. This year we focused on taking an active part of the Leftist Summit of Serbia's awareness campaign on worker's rights and consequences of the Labor law. Gender expression was a theme of the third LGBT+ museum we organised this year - it consisted of an exhibition, a panel discussion on role of families in creating one's gender identity as well as a Drag workshop. Water as a public good is one of the main topical focuses and so far we have organised a panel with an aim to mobilise people for lunching a campaign on protection of public sources of privatisation. Last EkoFest (our traditional annual activity) - a 2 days festival of documentary movies and public discussions focused on this issue as well. During a year we organise socially-engaged documentary movie screenings. Evrery year we organise at least one national educational seminar. In 2017 it was a School of Green Activism seminar.

On the international level, we co-organised several activities in the past year:
,,Smash borders, build solidarity!'' mobility of youth workers, Erasmus+ - ZOS a partner (FYEG coordinator)
,,From social rights to social wrongs'' - international activity, European Youth Foundation - hosted and co-organised with FYEG
,,Moving bridges'' - youth exchange with German Young Greens

In the blog we wrote about issues such as position of people who sustain themselves by collecting recyclable waste, GMO issue, deforestation, waste management, climate change, traffic and public space in big cities, pink-washing, commons, permaculture.

ZOS is a member of Federation of Young European Greens (FYEG) where we have a Board member, as well as of National Youth Council of Serbia and Leftist Summit of Serbia. Our member is an elected member of Advisory Council on Youth of Council of Europe (2018/2019 mandate).

All our activities are open, free and available for general public. There is no hierarchy in the organisation, though there are still structures and a clear division of tasks and responsibilities.