Being a youth led organisation has its benefits in the constant fluctuation of people and always having new ideas that new young people bring to the organisation. It is what makes youth organisations special and different than other. They are bringing changes to society and innovation to learning, activism, and volunteerism. At the same time being youth organisation is not that easy and sometimes that innovation spirit needs to suffer and to be put aside in order for organisation to fulfil different administrative and procedural jobs that are required for the organisation to be sustainable. Sometimes we are all thinking that we are working too hard creating things from the scratch Many youth organisations focus on creating new programs and keeping administrative costs low instead of building the organisational capacity necessary to achieve their aspirations efficiently. This is not surprising, given that donors and funders have traditionally been more interested in supporting an exciting new idea than in building an organisation that can effectively carry out that idea. Both youth organisations and those that fund them must recognise that excellence in programmatic innovation and implementation are insufficient for organisations to achieve lasting results. Great programs need great organisations behind them.This grant oriented work focuses us to believe that grants will be solution to all our problems while at same time neglecting all the potential organisation already has. Many of the consortium members while working on capacity building of other organisations realised that is a common problem, especially in the Western Balkans. Most of us successfully made a transition but not because of that “one big grant” but because of changes in strategic planning, organisational management, standardisation, volunteer management, fundraising and communication strategies. We changed our work and results of our work started changing as well as our impact. We did it with the support of business sector especially. We applied some of “their models” and transformed our work. This is how the idea for this project was born, and how we decided to work on capacity building of youth organisations to become sustainable and goal oriented. There is number of existing tools online but they are or just targeting one aspect of work and not looking in to entire picture or they are not tailor made for youth organizations that have constant changes in their leadership and are run on volunteers. When it comes to external communication many of them don’t take innovative trends of communication and researches done by business sector. This is reason why we believe there is growing need for up to date, integral and tailor made approach.
MakeOver project was organized in order to support youth organizations to become sustainable and goal oriented. We have built capacities of YO to deal with challenges related to their internal functioning to ensure long term strategic focus and sustainability of organizations through better knowledge, stuff, project and change management and preparing them to better communicate their work with the target groups.First, we determined which knowledge and skills should YO get in order to achieve our project goal.This was done at the Inception seminar at which we gathered Consortium members, stakeholders and expert, where we analyzed national realities and developed learning curriculums for: - Internal MO to lead YO through organizational transformation, and - External MO to lead YO through defining and reorganizing their communication. The Internal MO training based on the programs prepared followed. Through various interactive workshops, learning by doing and NFE feedbacking activities participants improved their capacities to do strategic planning of their YO, organization management and developing all internal procedures important for their work. Participants went to their organizations after that training with the draft of strategic plan and continued working on it with their teams. After this training Mentoring process for Internal MO started. During 2 months expert mentored participants for developing strategic plans and implementing other internal procedures in their organizations. Expert followed their work in YO and evaluated their achievements, giving them suggestions for further improvement. Mostly they were focused on the topics they recognized as week points in their organizations, mostly reorganization of human resources or knowledge management as process mostly unfamiliar with many.At External MO training participants learned how to prepare external communication strategy and now are able to use integrated communications and digital marketing tools. For that, we have used adjusted combination of expertise presentation, small working groups and YO teams work and sessions reflecting on every step of communication plan. Participants also learned how to use communication and fundraising for ensuring organizational sustainability. After this activity participants received the support from expert during the 2 months of Mentoring process for External MakeOver in the same way as it was done after the Internal Makeover.Both curriculums- Internal and External MO were transferred into Capacity Builder Online Mechanism. This platform contains also of Forum for support for all organizations who want to go through their transformation to allow them to consult other organizations who already went through the process. At this point more than 90 organizations used the mechanism.Last stage of the project was Dissemination and multiplication activity in which all its results are shared widely. This was done through direct multiplication and online promotion. Direct multiplication activities included presentation of CBOM by participants from the trainings to YO from their countries; presentation of CBOM by consortium members at meetings they have in other networks; presentation on various events such are conferences or even E+ meetings like our partner, E+ contact point, did in BiH. While online promotion was done through direct mailing and social media campaign reaching over 366 300 targeted audience. Direct mailing was used to inform our fellow YO whose contact either we have in our data bases, or we collected from SALTO and connecting-youth.org platform, presenting them with CBOM.We also involved stakeholders in the multiplication by sharing the information about CBOM with institutions, international networks etc. who work with YO. It is shared also at Salto platform for youth work results presentation. However, due to Covid19 crisis we have postponed our meetings with institutions such are EYF, CoE, OSCE, etc.