The community-building and retaining power of cultural activities and folk dance is the focus of a project starting in October, which has won European Union funding as a result of the joint application by civil organizations from three countries. This programme became necessary after the Hop Next Door (Lépj át a szomszédba) partnership-building meeting organized in Tata (Hungary) last June, where the organizations recognized that they were facing similar problems, namely low membership and ongoing difficulty in retaining current members. During the meetings held at the Tempus Public Foundation event, representatives of the Fóti Public Service Non-profit Ltd. from Hungary, FLOW-E.R. Environmental Association from Serbia, and Ér Hangja Association from Romania had not yet found a solution to this phenomenon affecting youth NGOs.
The project development was primarily motivated by the positive examples of cultural associations dealing with folk dance. So the organizations involved wondered what do they do better than other NGOs. Therefore, a project was born, called Let’s Dance! – Discovering the community-building and sustaining power and methods of folk dance and adapting them to youth NGOs to develop capacity. The Erasmus+ project aims to address the problems mentioned above and to identify and widely disseminate well-functioning practices that are responsible for the performance of cultural associations involved in folk dance and results in their efficiency. The organizers will create a methodological publication and collection of videos to help improve the capacity and operating performance of youth NGOs. They will also focus on involving disadvantaged young people in European-level cooperations and raise awareness of the importance of young people’s active participation in society.
