This week, the winning idea of the Secondary School of Mechanical Engineering students from Novi Sad, the renewal of the student canteen, was presented within the ‘Join and Find the Solution’ project. This project is implemented in cooperation with the ‘OPENS 2019’ organisation.

The ‘Join and Find the Solution’ project gives high school students from Novi Sad an opportunity to directly affect the improvement of their surroundings by offering creative solutions to certain existing problems. It’s a process throughout which students will learn how to recognize the needs of their communities, evoke the activist spirit within themselves and propose solutions. The trained facilitators from OPENS and Novi Sad – European Capital of Culture Foundation will lead the students through this process. Each school will implement two student ideas regarding culture as well as creation and activism of young people.

Teams competing for the best idea consist of minimum three people, while the financial prize for implementing the ideas, which is RSD 70,000.00, is given to the two best ideas at the school level.

Following the project’s criteria, the winning team led by Mihajlo Spasić proposed improving and renewing the student canteen. Since the school year has begun, the students have thoroughly and completely cleaned up the canteen, painted the whole space, replaced and fixed anything that didn’t work and put up the new wallpapers.

The ‘Join and Find the Solution’ is part of the Bid-Book of the ‘Novi Sad 2021 – European Capital of Culture’ project. The training is strategically focused on the transformation of Novi Sad by involving citizens, encouraging democratic decision processes and development of participative democracy among young people with the aim to implement activities useful for community.

Photo: V. Veličković