YPARD Serbia: Creating partnerships to better the position of young farmers

In early August 2018,  the biggest humanitarian foundation in Serbia “Ana and Vlade Divac Foundation” and I as the Serbian country representative for YPARD established cooperation.

This partnership is in line with YPARD Serbia’s mission to improve young farmer’s position in the country.  Ana and Vlade Divac Foundation has recognized the meaning of young people in agriculture and in 2017 has created an agricultural fond for young families and high school students. Willing to help more in young farmers issue, this humanitarian organization, called a meeting with YPARD Serbia.

First of all, the representatives of this organization were drawn to some of my online blog on young farmers and facebook page dedicated to YF. Which goes to show that media impact YPARD Serbia was strategically making in the last couple of months, gave results! and will continue to do so!

Partnership scope 

After two hours of very constructive talk, we concluded that both sides have the same goal: making circumstances in agriculture better for young farmers. In first steps of Ana and Vlade Divac Foundation and YPARD Serbia partnership, every texts or information of importance for youth in agriculture developed by YPARD Serbia have will be cross-posted and shared on Ana and Vlade Divac Foundation website and facebook page as well as on subvencije.rs (a website about subsidies in agriculture in Serbia) with whom DF already cooperate. This site about agriculture is one of the most visited in Serbia, so YPARD Serbia will now have a bigger access to a larger audience and potentially increase the number of young farmers.

The first published text on this site was about “Young farmers in Serbia and Europe” (see English version HERE) as an effort of both organizations to show the similarity of young farmers problem all around the world and to make this matter global. At the end of the piece, there are links to other texts about singular problems youth that in agriculture face. The partnership also means that every information Ana and Vlade Divac Foundation has, referring to young farmers will be published on websites and facebook pages that YPARD Serbia runs.

We are still considering the options of making the partnership wider, so there is great potential for joint appearances at fairs or educational lectures for youth in agriculture. In the next months and hopefully by the end of this year, YPARD Serbia will have its first appearance and participation on agricultural fairs.

Picture credit: Ana and Vlade Divac Foundation/YPARD Serbia