By Annemarie Majlund
MOBA was launched in 2012 as a youth-led social venture, started in order to bridge development initiatives with cross-generational participation in Sarajevo’s neighborhoods.
Today the project involves a risingnumber of volunteers and pro-activecitizens of Sarajevo, who all have in common a wish to investtheir time for the benefit of Sarajevo and itscitizens. Luka Kasitz, who is one of the three founders of the initiative tells ’Sarajevo Times’ the story of Mo.Ba, which emphasizes friendship, partnership and commitment as the driving forces behind the project.
What’s in a name
”Moba is a local word describing a traditional practice in this region of joint community work. Our organisation Moba promotes social responsibility in the same way. We consider that to simply mean to care for one another by taking care of our neighbourhoods and the places where we live, but to also help each other to work for our common benefit”, says Luka, the 28 year old landscape architect. He started the initiative Mo.Ba, an Association for the Promotion of Social Responsibility together with friends back in 2011 and has since been one of the three committed ‘leaders’ of the project
”We wanted to emphasise that this practice has existed in the country for centuries and that it’s about relationships. As such, the organisation simply developed from a group of young people sharing ideas of friendship and care, but it has now incorporated more and more people and turned into an organization.”
Mission Sarajevo Neighbourhood – a stepping stone for youth entrepreneurship
With a leadership of threepeople as well as a core group of volunteers of 10-15 people,Mo.Ba has succeded in engaging a larger community of active volunteers. Now over 200 people have participated in the events organized in 2013 alone.
Driven by the founder’s interest for outdoor public spaces as well as the overall beauty and functionality of the city, the parks and gardens of Sarajevo naturally became the center of activities. However, a somewhat odd combination of this interest with one of the co-founders passion for baseball led to the idea of organizing free baseball lectures and practice for kids and youth of various Sarajevo neighborhoods.
This combination again became a ‘baseball – then clean your neighborhood strategy put in place with the aim to improve the outdoor spaces of Sarajevo through the engagement of Sarajevans participating in the baseball matches.
Luka explains: ”We wanted to emphasise that money is not the most important thing. Also we wanted to encourage young people to think differently, to think entrepeneural, to think about the bigger community and to say ‘hey, join us and maybe we can help you develop your business idea or ideas for some kind of civic action’”.
Not just ‘partners on paper’
Stressing the importance of cross-organisational partnerships for the success of the project, MoBa has stepped up activities when it comes to reaching out to the broader community:
”We’ve been really keen on partnering. We’ve been partnering with the Lets do it-campaign and the organisations for tourism and environmental protection. This weekend we’re participating in the Days of Architecture and we’ve also been participting in City Archipuncture,which is a regional workshop for local revivalisation initiatives based on functional interventions in the urban areas. So that’s a lot! And it’s all about ‘let’s make this city better’, he says with enthusiasm and continues:
”We can’t do that by one initiative. We need to partner with other organisations and do projects on a regular basis. That’s why we emphasize park cleaning in Sarajevo. It’s not enough once a year to go out and maybe paint a bench or clean a park. It’s getting community members involved every weekend. The only way we can make a bigger impact is if we work together. So the idea of commitment is really big with us, and not just to be partners on paper but also partners in real life.”
Commitment to make a difference
With 25 park-cleaning actions this year Mo.Ba has been contributing to the embellishment of Sarajevo’s public areas more than once a week, a level of activity reflecting the commitment to making the city a better place for the benefit of it’scitizens and visitors.
”I think Mo.ba is going to do something special for this city but we’ll keep it down low from now. We’ve done our work honestly and passionately and comittedly but we’re still in a learning process and we can learn a lot more in the future. So I will say, ‘jos malo’, the Mo.Ba front figure says and smiles before he moves on and finishes:
”2000 KM has been our operating budget per year, so we also invested a lot of our own money and did all kinds of activities to earn that money. Every fenning we earned. So that’s the level of commitment people need to invest in the city to make a difference. We just want to be a role model in that sense.”
Youcan find Mo.Ba on facebook via https://www.facebook.com/mobasarajevo
Or via website: http://www.mobasarajevo.org/
