Ne dam Nu dau (in english, “I won’t give it”) is a citizen-led association committed to being a part of the change that will imbue better living conditions for everyone in Eastern Serbia. Their work focuses on community organising because they know that without popular demands for a radical rethink of institutional power, change can’t be shaped. They ignite people’s critical thinking and agency through information and political education: a path to unleash the power of their voice, their vote, and their right to hold institutions accountable. This civic resistance collective functions as a confluence of movements, its members being seasoned activists who are knee deep into neighborhood politics and experimenting with local democracy. Ne dam Nu dau brings these community leaders together so they can zoom out of their particular contexts and develop wider strategies that can reach people outside the movements. The result is a series of public activities that they co-develop together: public discussions, awareness raising campaigns and community actions that directly work on transparency, responsibility, and civic participation.
This work is particularly important in the Serbian political context. In a country where elections, media, and where many of the democratic mechanisms are rigged, civil engagement towards corruption monitoring becomes paramount. Through Ne dam Nu da’s consistent oversight, they identify areas of corruption, and their assiduous tracking has already made institutions act more cautiously and responsibly, they say. Firmly believing that change happens from the ground up and with local governance as a fractal of wider political transformation, Ne dam Nu da is doing the crucial work of popularising strategies and tactics that promote transparency and demand accountability, empowering citizens to actively build participation mechanisms that influence and shape governance and institutional power.
The Guerrilla Redistribution
In the lead up to the 2025 local elections, Guerrilla’s funding was essential to support Ne dam Nu dau in harnessing the political momentum for greater government scrutiny. Through public discussions, field activities and multimedia outreach, our funding helped to develop initiatives where citizens would get informed about their rights, responsibilities, and ultimately about the importance of participating in the upcoming local elections, strengthening democratic engagement and promoting accountability of local institutions. Concretely, they trained around 100 local election monitors from villages and neighbourhoods, giving them practical knowledge on how to recognise pressure, vote buying and irregularities, and how to document them safely. They also held small-scale community meetings and street discussions, creating a space where people could talk openly about fear, political pressure, and how to resist it together. They made voting material accessible because that is also a contested right in Serbia, and used local media and social networks to break the narrative of hopelessness that would invite citizens to stand up for their right to freely choose who to vote for.
