Music4Change Videos

Name: Dragana Jevtić

Title: Founder Creative Mentorship, NGO

About CM

Creative mentorship is an independent NGO founded in Serbia 11 years ago as a bottom-up initiative. The focus of creative mentorship is supporting personal and professional development in the field of arts, culture, creative industries and media. 300 people went through our one-year mentoring program. We also support other organizations in running their own mentoring programs. And the third pillar of our mission is that we spread the idea of mentorship and share our passion for mentorship because for us, mentorship is one of the strongest tools for professional and personal development.

40s

The program 0:40-2:05

So when we say creative mentorship, we're not talking about academic mentorship. We're not talking about the mentorship where a professor supports a PhD student in writing a thesis. We're talking about mentorship where mentee is in the focus and where the needs of the mentee are in the focus. And then mentor is found hopefully from different fields, different sectors, different generations, hopefully even from a different country to support the development of these needs of the mentee. So that's why it's really, really important. It's intersectoral connection and mentoring. Once these mentees have grown professionally, we will have an impact on our society as well because they will further spread these values of mutual support and lifelong learning into their own organizations, their environments and even their families. So we'll have a wider impact on the society as well.

We hope that Music for Change will just be the start of our cooperation, that in the years to come we'll start many, not just pilot mentoring programs, but many mentoring programs for professionals in music so that we have mentorship as established method of personal and professional development of professionals in the field of arts and culture.

1 min 25 s

Context 2:05-3:20

For the past 11 years, I've been working only with mentorship, but also I have been a mentee in the pilot mentoring program Creative Mentorship. But 11 years after that, today I'm still a mentee with another amazing mentor. And I have also been a mentor in three different mentoring programs, so I know both angles. This learning experience has changed not just my work, but my life and the life of many people around me. So I strongly believe that we should all engage in some forms of mentoring. One really great experience is one of our mentees, Maya Ciorcić, and she works with Roma children. So she was inviting other kids to sing Roma music with Roma children. And I went with my child and with my husband to this program where we all together sang Roma songs, which we knew in Serbian, but we never knew in Roma language. So this was an amazing experience where we overcame barriers, which we would otherwise never. So really music overcomes all the barriers. And that's why I believe Music for Change is an amazing project.

1 min 15 s