To popularize and promote civic engagement in the post-industrial zasavska region we will conduct so-called civil society hackathon. The project aims to engage and encourage civil society in active democratic participation. Population aging is one of the biggest challenges we face in the region. The elderly population is often neglected and socially excluded. With our civil society hackathon, we aim to address this issue as a society.

Slovenia, zasavska region (towns Zagorje ob Savi, Litija, Trbovlje, Hrastnik), 56.000 inhabitants.

In the zasavska region, there is low-level awareness of the importance of civic engagement and there isn't any evidence of structured approaches to effective civil dialog. As a community, we are facing many challenges, especially in the transformation from post-industrial place to modern society. With aged demographic picture these problems are becoming bigger and with more passing years they will be even harder to address. In our case we will address the social exclusion of the elderly. The idea is to approach aged demographic related problems with the civil engagement mechanism which will allow the civil society to actively cooperate in designing solutions for inclusion, living improvement, and service accessibility for the elderly.

Our idea will mainly address issues of the elderly which are often neglected, socially excluded, and sometimes considered just as a useless group of people. With our civil society hackathon, we aim to address this issue as a society and try to design great inclusion programs, various solutions for living improvement, and intergenerational programs for the elderly and also elderly people with disabilities. We will invite young people and children to participate (youth NGOs and NGOs that work with children), also environmental, cultural, social NGOs and other volunteers.

In the first phase, we will build a team of partner organizations, representatives of local authorities, and selected media. The team will select the main topics - issues and agreed to participate in promotional activities of the project.
Second phase (duration: throughout the whole project): implementation of the promotional campaign and various activities for different age groups to promote civic engagement importance, to expose possible consequences of aged demographic structure and to present best possibilities for building a society where the elderly are considered as valued and appreciated members.
Third phase: Conducting the hackathon and selecting the best project.
Fourth: Implementing and promoting the winning project
Fifth phase: Dissemination of results

At least 20 engaged and empowered NGOs;
Collaboration of at least one representative of local governments from each municipality (4 municipalities);
Collaboration of at least one nursing home and 4 other community development-related organizations;
Implementation of one regional civil society Hackathon;
Implementation of at least 4 bigger activities in cooperation with selected NGOs;
One large promotional and educational campaign implemented;
At least 5 proposed projects by civil society;
One winning and implemented project proposed by civil society;
Strengthening the relationship between NGOs and other stakeholders;
Effectively promoted the importance and the necessity of civic engagement in the region

The idea of civil society hackathon, which will be a major milestone of the project, is to use the popular concept of the hackathon and imply it to engage and involve the community and the decision-makers to collectively address selected issues. With this innovative and appealing approach of actively involving various groups of people in the very well designed work process of addressing selected regional issues, we will engage, promote and popularize the idea of active democratic participation of society. The results of a civil society hackathon will be projects ideas, initiatives, action plans, events, programs... With all this we will prove that public participation can lead to wonderful end effective projects and that active citizenship means a more fulfilling life for all.

As an NGO support organization, we are very motivated to empower NGOs to actively cooperate in decision-making processes and to encourage them to be directly involved in designing solutions for the target groups that they are working with. One of our main goals is to establish a quality civil dialogue and strengthen relationships with organized civil society and other decision-makers. In current case, we aim to address problems arising from the aged demographic structure and if the project will be successful we will continue with other issues.

Salaries and fees: 24.000,00 EUR
Campaign costs: 2.000,00 EUR
Implementation of parallel activities: 2.000,00 EUR
Implementation of winning projects: 10.000,00 EUR
Equipment rent and catering: 3000,00 EUR
Logistic and technical costs: 1000,00 EUR
Other expenses / indirect expenses: 1000,00€

We would like to receive general feedback on the idea, hear of similar practices, of challenges related to the presented issue, and of course experiences with similar civil society hackathons.