Red Emma’s

Please join us at Red Emma's in welcoming Fredi as he presents the grassroots solidarity and community organizing of Belgrade, Serbia. Austerity, structural adjustments, and capitalist expansion continues to destabilize and threaten communities around the world. Social movements, neighbors, and anarchists have long worked in solidarity to tangibly provide for each other, and build brighter more cooperative futures. Koko Lepo is an autonomous youth solidarity program in Belgrade, Serbia founded on the principles of equality and mutual aid. It is closely tied to the anarchist and antifascist scene in the Balkans and beyond. The collective itself, a mix of adults, teens, and children mostly hail from an informal settlement in Belgrade called "the Dump". The presenter will narrate the evolution of this program from a free kindergarten in the defunct InexFilm squat to a broader youth program. The discussion will focus on issues of anti-ziganism (prejudice against Roma/gypsies), autonomous solidarity efforts in Belgrade, the difference between charity and mutual aid, and the struggle against hierarchy; the presenter welcomes challenges and suggestions for continued solidarity and new connections.