We believe that the increasing growth can be reached by constantly challenging our structures of knowledge. Therefore, the goal of this project was to manage to channel new competences to the professionals outside the well-known context. We achieved transferring the know-how of social hackathon to SINHRO and mentoring them in their mission to improve skills of their local community being able manage challenges. Also, throughout this project, we have had the unique and bold opportunity to implement the never before organized community planning marathon in Serbia. We mobilized the community and stakeholders to focus on the problem of mobility, and to empower the community for ideas implementation. This was achieved by engaging citizens in Pancevo in creating solutions for mobility issues. By empowering citizens to directly provide their own solutions for social issues, focusing on building experience and interaction rather than winning and success, and underlining the ownership of ideas as a method for increasing sustainability of the solutions, we have increased participation and civic engagement in the local community of Pancevo.
The idea that fueled this project was to empower social innovation, civic engagement, multisectoral cooperation and most of all – community trust, through introducing and building another structure – the methodology of the community planning marathon, first time in Serbia (Pancevo). People and groups from the community in Pancevo, in the years behind were recognizing the mobility problems that are increasing in their town, caused by urbanization and automobiles as the main preferred transportation method, with no efficient infrastructure, or carbon footprint regulations. Throughout the years, the need for a solution increased and individuals and groups even though they were having ideas, they didn’t have enough capacity to organize concrete action to implement their ideas. The partner organization SINHRO and their community needed an efficient and innovative methodology for community problem solving. KOFE, with their pool of professionals, answered this need and provided the long and thorough learning and mentoring journey for the partnership, adapting the flexible methodology to unique local conditions, tailoring the learning process to the needs of the receiver of the new skills and knowledge.