Special thanks to the Vocational School of Aesthetics, Style and Body Care, Belgrade, for providing us with a superb meeting place, and to Jagoda Petrovic-Ukaj for arranging for the space for us.

IAF Serbia, Meeting minutes – 08 September 2007

1)      Introduction – presenting each other’s background and job/work and how we use(d) facilitation skills.

2)      Presentation of facilitation and program activities “School for beauty and health” - Jagoda Petrovic-Ukaj

3)      Presentation of the project “Multicultural Cooperation in Education – A Road to Europe” - Milica Turnic.

4)      Visioning – creating the vision of IAF Serbia

5)      Next meeting - timing and place.

Tamara shared the importance of the new approach called “Multi-stakeholder process & social learning” (attended training in Holland).

Members who will be attending IAF conference are: Tamara, Bojan, Suzana and Rosemary.

Membership with IAF:

-          The name of Ms. Snezana Brcic, appeared on the list of members. Nobody out of present members are familiar with who the persons is and we should make effort to find out her and to get into contact.

-          Annual IAF Membership fee is 50$ and people shared the experience of e-banking and (MASTER Card goes through) as on the list of countries there is no Serbia, Yugoslavia, so our county can not be “selected” from the drop-down menu. Sladjana shared the experience of receiving the Invoice and paying through banks in Serbia - a bit more expensive but worked out.

Using the IAF e-resources and databases on methodologies is a great tool for all members. There is a book on facilitation in Serbian, written by Slobodan (?) from Nis.

The experience with “appreciative inquiry” was mentioned as one of the new methodologies. The difference between the “theory” and the actual field “practice” was mentioned in private and non-profit sector.

General agreement was made that each experience on using methodologies (open space, appreciative inquiry, how we facilitate and achieve changes in communities we are working in, etc) we had, should be written and shared in the form of “case-study” or database of information for now through wiki IAF pages (http://iafserbia.pbwiki.com).

One of the experiences is that through the project “Reka mleka” community members write stories about the biggest changes they experienced after facilitated action planning sessions and their implementation.

“Horizontal learning” experience and the story about a teacher in a South Africa village was shared by Rosemary. The teacher actually started to raise crops in the schoolyard to feed pupils without any donor funds. Change depends on the structure, ability and capacity of the community and there are three levels of change: Emergent change (can be achieve though “accompaniment”)l Transformative change (which deals with blockages and releases huge amounts of creativity); and “Projectable” change, when conditions are more stable.  (Community Development Resource Association, Cape Town, South Africa www.cdra.org.za/)

“Civilization and Organization” Workshops - Barry Oshry divides participants into three levels: top (elite), middle (mangers) and bottom (immigrants) and concludes that the most powerful level to work for change is in the middle whereas the bottom people need empowerment to act powerfully. The challenge at the top of any system is “complexity”.

Often only regular meetings (place and time for people to communicate regularly) among different stakeholders are very powerful mechanism for change. (www.powerandsystems.com/)

Goals of the IAF Serbia were summarized as follows:

1)      Raising awareness

2)      Facilitating connections/networking and among different projects on the field.

3)      Sharing information, case studies , stories and methodologies.

Visioning exercise:

Create a drawing of IAF Serbia vision through constructing values (foundations of the house), structure – where and how often we meet, make decisions, what are we going to deal with etc. and interior of the house (services we will have/provide, for us, for members, for communities etc) Our visions of our IAF Serbia network

Next meeting is scheduled for November 24, 2007 in Uzice.