Bucharest        For the twenty-third year, a delegation from the Organizers Forum made its way to Eastern Europe to meet with groups in Romania and Bulgaria over the coming week beginning in Bucharest.  Appropriately, our first meeting was with the well-respected community training and support organization, CeRe and its director, Anda Serban, who despite being on vacation, generously made time for us in the patio of their offices in a house in a well-appointed neighborhood near the center of the city.

CeRe was founded in 2006 by a former employee of the now Trump-depleted NDI, the National Democracy Institute, who wanted to increase citizen participation among democracy-centered nonprofits.  Anda was well-connected in Eastern Europe with similar training and support centers.  CeRe is part of ECON, the European Community Organization Network. CATU, ACORN’s affiliate in Ireland, is the only membership-based member of that alliance, she told us.  Most of the rest in Hungary, Poland, and other countries are similar campaign and local group support networks.  Anda explained that they had ten staff at this point with most of their funding coming from the European Union, though EU funding has become precariously competitive.  They recently scored 93 of 100 on an application, and still failed to be funded.

Anda had also been the Romanian director of the network based in the United States that had benefited from State Department funding until the Trump DOGE cutbacks. That project worked on fellowship exchanges from various countries including Albania, Bulgaria, and Slovenia with community-based organizations in the US.  ACORN has been part of those exchanges in the past, as had Virginia Organizing and Action NC in North Carolina among others.

Historically, CeRe had worked largely in Bucharest, but in recent years had expanded to focus on rural projects as well.  One involved supporting various efforts by 27 small groups of activists along the portions of the Danube River that run through Romania.  These efforts seem to cover the waterfront from clean water to reducing plastics in the river.

We asked Anda about the past movements involving mass demonstrations several years ago against corruption as well as the current, confusing political situation.  There had been a lot of hope initially, she told us, in the party created to block corruption, but there was less now as much of it had drifted more to the right.  The current president had been mayor of Bucharest and they had partnered on several projects and worked with him.  She was skeptical though in the next elections if anything could block the far-right from winning.

Anda has worked in the Romanian version of the United Way before coming to CeRe, so we traveled down some roads with her about whether any of their methods of payroll deductions for participating unions and corporations would be useful in supporting CeRe.  She didn’t feel like any of those would work for them, and was also very skeptical of any membership-based efforts that would support the organization or its groups, although it was clear that this viewpoint was based more on supposition than experience.

Thanks to Anda and CeRe we had a great dialogue raising our expectations for our visits with many groups in Romania and Bulgaria over the coming week.