The NGO Leadership Workshop is an innovative program designed to strengthen civil society in Europe and Eurasia by providing management training to non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The week-long workshops are offered free of charge and are sponsored by the Weiser Center for Europe & Eurasia (WCEE), in partnership with the William Davidson Institute (WDI) at the University of Michigan.
Since 2015, WCEE and WDI have offered 12 workshops to over 275 NGO leaders from across the region. The first four workshops were held annually and targeted participants from across Central and Eastern Europe, as well as Central Asia and the Caucasus. In 2019, the organizers introduced a new model with two workshops per year—one in Bratislava, Slovakia with partner organization Ambrela (and later Hekima) that was designed to meet the needs of participants from Visegrad-4 countries and the other in Warsaw, Poland with partner organization Education for Democracy Foundation (FED) targeting NGO leaders from countries east of Poland. The COVID-19 pandemic then forced a pivot in programming—read more about how we adjusted over this time. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, we adjusted our focus again and offered a workshop in Warsaw in October 2022 for regional NGO leaders assisting Ukrainian refugees. In September 2023, we hosted a workshop in Lublin, Poland—located less than 75 miles from the Ukrainian border—exclusively for Ukrainian civil society leaders. We then continued this model in June 2024 by offering another workshop for Ukrainian leaders in Košice, Slovakia. Our next workshop will be held in October 2024 in Warsaw for another 25 NGO leaders from across Ukraine.
The video below highlights the Summer 2024 workshop in Košice, Slovakia.
For more information, please contact WCEE at weisercenter@umich.edu.
