Urgent Funding Appeal: The Workshop Belgrade
Donation protected
The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged NGO operations worldwide and has forced funding cuts across the Balkan region to organisations working with refugees. Unfortunately, The Workshop has not remained immune. Just before Christmas, we learned that our primary donor would not be able to fund us for the foreseeable future.
We currently have enough funding to keep us going until March 31, 2022. With your help, we’re aiming to raise 6,500 Euros through this campaign – enough to ensure our doors stay open through the end of May, and hopefully beyond.
The Workshop was co-founded in April of 2017 by North Star and Refugee Aid Serbia. Our goal was and remains to create a safe space for refugees in Belgrade where they can access educational and recreational activities. Over the past five years, our incredible volunteers and staff have made this vision possible, elevating it to something beyond what we had ever imagined.The Workshop now comprises two projects – The Workshop: Belgrade and The Workshop: On the Road, through which we’ve begun offering classes and recreational activities at institutional centers and camps throughout Serbia.
We have developed curricula for English, German and Serbian language classes, in addition to offering various recreational activities for our students throughout the week at our Belgrade location. The COVID-19 pandemic saw us begin to teach online, something that we have continued to do. We now operate online five days a week and in the physical space three days a week. We have found that online classes are very popular among young mothers, children and those students who are enrolled in the Serbian school system and have less time to commute to the city. In 2021, we taught a total of 954 classes (561 online and 393 in-person).
In September 2021, we launched The Workshop: On the Road. This project has seen us visit refugee camps and government-run institutional centres for unaccompanied and separated refugee children to provide recreational activities and excursions. In the last few months of 2021, we visited three refugee camps in Adaševci, Principovac and Kikinda and three government-run institutional centres for children in Belgrade and Niš, where we hosted football and cricket matches and visited local museums.
Our goal in 2022 is to teach 1,200 classes and to continue to provide recreational activities and excursions, which we can only do with your help!
Thank you for your support! Your assistance ensures we can continue providing these resources to refugees throughout Serbia, guaranteeing that The Workshop remains open as the safe, collaborative space it has been for refugees for nearly five years.
To find out more information about the Workshop, please see the links below:
Organizer
Jessica Collins
Organizer
Danielson, CT
