FA11: No Country for Refugees

Silvia Casalino joined us for the Talk#16. Silvia is an activist and the EuroCentralAsian Lesbian* Community Executive Co-Director. EL*C  directs a specific effort to strengthening and (re)building the lesbian movement across Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The organization, born in 2016, is developing a research and data collection on lesbian women in the region, to help advocacy locally and internationally for the human rights of lesbians. In the path of gathering the international community and therefore mapping existing lesbian grassroots organizations, EL*C reached Central Asian countries such as Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, but also Poland, Romania, Hungary, Balkan region and many more.

FundAction talk #15 goes to Hungary, to explore the collaboration of two organizations that use critical pedagogy to achieve systemic social change in the increasingly authoritarian Hungarian context. Our member Agi Fernengel introduces the civic educational program “Deviszont Community Space” and the community-based education center “The School of Public Life” .Together, they cooperate to provide trainings and educational projects to communities (respectively: working class youth, and people organizing for social justice) about systemic social inequalities and provide them with tools to organize for social change and strengthen their communities.

Agnes Molnar is part of the 20-years old Alternative Communities Association (AKE) in Hungary. In our talk #13, Agnes told us more about the joint effort of AKE, the city of Debrecen and K-Monitor to introduce the Hungarian school system to the tool of participatory budgeting (PB) with the aim of overturning a hyper centralized system of economic management and resources distribution to the schools. The project goes hands in hands with a powerful approach to civic engagement & pedagogy which will engages students, parents, teachers and school administrators in the process of dewhich improvements to fund through the development and implementation of community-oriented micro-projects within one school-term.  Envisioning the PB process a a tool to foster civic participation and democratic communities, the project constitute the first mile stone of a long path.

Aleksandra Savanović (Belgrade) joined us for FA Talks #13. We talk about the ongoing research carried out by Zajedničko, a research and educational platform from Belgrade, dedicated to  studying, supporting and initiating models and practices within the  economic democracy framework - in partnership with Association for Culture and Art Crvena (Sarajevo) and Institute for Political Ecology (Zagreb). Starting from Zajedničko’s previous work on commons, economic democracy and alternative economies and following up from their From Yugoslav self-management to contemporary commons project (supported through FA’s ReThink program which allowed to initiate the cooperation) – the new joint research aims  to critically assess the Yugoslav self-management system and by  examining its complex legacy in the context of the forthcoming economic  recession and social crisis, offer practical guidelines for  re-organizing (reclaimed) public services and democratizing management  and ownership models within the production sector.

With podcast #12 FundAction inaugurates a new Podcast season, dedicated to its members & organizations, daily achievements and struggles, beyond any grants. We begin with a conversation with Juan del Río, member of Red de Transición, a Spanish association dedicated to strengthening community resilience, ecological sustainability and local economy, since 2013. Red is part of the International Transition Movement and a founding member of ECOLISE. They are now gathering a large Spanish-speaking community in Europe and Latin America to launch a new collaborative Community of Practice for ecosocial just transition. Find out more here!

In the FA Talks #11 we invited our member Carmen Dupont from Lesvos Solidarity, to talk about the ongoing refugee situation on the island,  the evolution of the complex binding of  political trajectories in the aftermath of the fire in Moria Camp and the eviction of the Pikpa one: an independent refugee camp in Lesvos (Greece) that hosted around 200 residents among the most vulnerable in the island.

During the Annual Assembly 2020, FA Talks engaged in a live conversation with Zsuzsi Pósfai, Bea Varnai (urbaMonde) and Ana Dzokic about Cooperative housing (and trade unions) & the MOBA Housing International Network: an organization developed between different countries of South and Central East Europe, as a gathering of pioneering experiences and initiatives in Coop Housing. Beyond a similar socialist historical background, in the last 30 years, these countries are also sharing an increment of privatization and the progressive disappearing of social housing. Their organizations focus on Common, collective ownership and no speculative financing which drove them toward the creation of MOBA, as a way to collectively overcome local concerns.

Talk#9 dives into the work of Habita! Organization from Portugal, through the words of our member Rita Silva. Habita! is an independent collective established in 2014 in Lisbon, Portugal, that fights for the Right to Housing and to the City, understanding these two components as directly connected. The current pandemic crisis has made more visible the correlation between housing and public health problems. Habita! promoted a political campaign with other groups in order to pressured Lisbon municipality to respond to the needs of the homeless people left without food distribution, shelter or access to sanitation for the first weeks of the pandemic. 

In Talk#8 we discuss with Yuliya Georgieva has been struggling for years to make the problem of drug users known to the authorities and force them to act on it. The team from The Center for Humane Policy has been ensuring the existence of the Pink house at the moment the only drop-in center for PWUD (usually  homeless, living well below the poverty line, and in deteriorating  health) which survives only by individual donations and voluntary labor. Now they try to convince the authorities to act on this problem and help them. 

Talk#7  Besides being a FA member, Ana Vračar is part of OWID a civil society  organisation based in Zagreb, Croatia. It was formed in 2012, and it is  committed to the protection and promotion of workers' rights, democratic  decision-making processes among workers, and economic democracy. OWID  is a member of the Cooperative for Ethical Financing and is involved in  the regional network of People’s Health Movement in Europe. PH grant  supports the specific research on the privatisation of health and the  development of (re)municipalisation and participatory models in health  care and the “Our Health Is Not For Sale” international Campaign.