A Priceless Process

Soon these diehard hometown fans won't have to leave town to show their support. Photo: Layton Croft for Mercy Corps

You have to drive 20 minutes to get there, and if you don't arrive at least 20 minutes before the game begins, you'll probably have to watch it standing. Unless you're the deputy mayor.

Before he started his career in local government more than a decade ago, when Slobodan Milosevic was tightening his communist grip on Serbian and regional Yugoslav politics, Petar used to be a physical education teacher. And his former students, the youth screaming in the bleachers, remember him fondly, adding his name to their cheerleading chants as he squeezes through a packed arena and takes a courtside seat. It's the day of one of the most important games for Petar's hometown team. They are battling a rival squad from Vojvodina, up north, and the winner of tonight's game will enter the prestigious Division I league, where the best Serbian teams compete.

But with so much on the line, it's really too bad the host team's 'homecourt' is not in its hometown.

Indeed, the fact that local fans have to leave their town to experience a home game is a point of contention here, where locals pride themselves on their athletic ability, and their diehard support of their basketball team. Several years ago, Petar and others in local government responded to expressed community requests for a new sports arena in town. Funds were allocated and a local construction firm contracted. But for some reason, perhaps connected to radical changes in Serbian national and local political leadership in late 2000, no new arena was built. In fact, no work on the project ever began.

Meanwhile, Mercy Corps launched a new community development initiative in town in late summer 2001. Funded by USAID, Mercy Corps's Community Revitalisation through Democratic Action programme brought local activists from across the community, both formal and informal leaders, together. Mercy Corps facilitates a participatory prioritization and decision-making process in which community development interests are articulated and responded to, in the form of small infrastructure projects.

Petar recalls the first meetings of the new community development council, and how there was overwhelming support for renovating the old, decrepit community sports hall. Participants decided to allocate limited Mercy Corps funding to rebuilding a facility core to the heart and spirit of the community. A modern athletic complex would bring the community, and especially the youth, together in healthy competition. It would keep young people out of trouble, and, as Petar and other hopeful parent activists dreamed, it would keep them from growing up and moving away.

Inspired by the promise of a brighter future and a better place to live, the community development council and Mercy Corps started making plans for construction. But it wasn't long until the seemingly forgotten, though unfulfilled contracts signed a few years before came to light, and Mercy Corps froze project funding until local leaders and previously paid construction bosses talked. For a while tensions rose and acrimony threatened to stifle, not revitalise, the community. It looked as if there would never be a new sports arena.

But after extensive discussions, sometimes mediated by Mercy Corps community development experts, Petar and his colleagues negotiated a deal with the originally contracted firm to commence construction according to the previously signed, and paid, contracts. Workers began building the new sports complex, and Mercy Corps and the community development council re-allocated project funds to other priority needs in town.

Today, after a year of mobilizing groups of committed individuals like Petar across southern Serbia to play more decisive and active roles in revitalising their communities, Mercy Corps has spent more than $2 million US dollars in supporting more than 60 projects. And although none of that money was spent on building the new sports arena, the pro-active, participatory process Mercy Corps catalyzed in Petar's hometown refueled local initiative so that concrete results are, finally, being witnessed by all.

In the end, Petar's team won the decisive May 11 game. And it won't be long until the legions of loyal and spirited youth in his community will not only support their team in Division I competition, but they'll be able to walk to the games.

[Editor's Note: Petar is a pseudonym.]