Based in Novi Sad, Serbia, CK13 Youth Centre is an 18-year-old grassroots social centre that has become an irreplaceable pillar of alternative political culture and community organising in a country marked by deep corruption, state-sanctioned violence, and the systematic stigmatisation of civil society. Operating from the “Black House” under the constant threat of legal eviction and listed on the government’s registry of organisations suspected of “money laundering and terrorist financing”, CK13 functions as a rare safe haven for political misfits, queers, feminists, unhoused people, and young activists in a society traumatised by genocide, patriarchal violence, and a culture of denial. The centre hosts over 300 events annually, concerts, public discussions, non-formal educational seminars, community radio broadcasts, and activist library programs, serving as a logistical and spiritual home for dozens of grassroots collectives, from the Kitchen of Solidarity (which provides meals to homeless folks twice a week) to the Art Cinema collective and the Infoteka activist library. CK13’s work is defined by an ethos of radical non-violence, intergenerational care, and bridging dialogue, rooted in the conviction that the “lived experience of democracy” must be embodied, not just theorised. The organisation is run horizontally by a dedicated core team and a broader membership of activist-volunteers, making decisions through consensus and maintaining accountability to their wider community through regular “House Meetings”. In a context where civic space is shrinking, public protests are met with government-organised violence, and fourteen people died recently in a preventable railway canopy collapse that symbolises the rot of the system, CK13 persists as a testament to “biophilic conviction”, the stubborn, hopeful belief that another world is possible.
The Guerrilla Redistribution
Our funding will provide the kind of stable, unrestricted core support that CK13 desperately needs but rarely receives, covering a portion of the operational costs that keep the centre’s doors open and its programs running. This funding is not tied to specific project deliverables but to the very infrastructure of resistance: the rent, utilities, technical maintenance, and administrative coordination that enable 30 to 50 different organisations and countless individuals to use CK13’s premises annually for their own activist and cultural initiatives. Concretely, the money will sustain the delivery of four Alternative Politics Seminars, five Public Discussions, one Regional Activist Youth School about the ’90s, three Activist Outdoor Campaigns, a publishing program including a landmark Serbian translation of Carol J. Adams’ eco-feminist writings, the community radio’s 500-plus archive of shows, and the XX Century Book Fair. The funding also ensures the continued operation of the Infoteka activist library, which translates and publishes two critical texts monthly and hosts regular reading circles and screenings. Most importantly, this core funding allows CK13’s small team to shift energy from constant fundraising toward the qualitative, relationship-based work of community building, training young people as facilitators, supporting new activist initiatives, and nurturing the “contagious courage” that transforms passive attendees into active agents of change. The success of this work will be measured in the 70 seminar participants who deepen their intersectional understanding of injustice, the 1,000 community members who engage with alternative political discourses, the 30% of participants who introduce qualitative change in their thinking and feeling, and the 10% who become involved in sustained activism. But the truest measure of success is the simple, defiant fact that, after 18 years of struggle, through eviction threats, police persecution, and the daily grind of poverty, CK13 still stands, its doors open, its community cooking, its radio broadcasting, its library growing, proving that spaces of freedom, however precarious, are worth fighting for until “the world is altered forever”.
