On the December 20, 2022, we held a meeting with the Project Department Team of the Ministry of Labor, Employment, Veterans, and Social Welfare of Serbia, with the Department Coordinator Mr. Uros Zivkovic and his colleagues. From the JRS side our management team was present: Coordinator Jelena Djurdjevic, Financial Manager and Deputy Director Adrian Nikacevic, and Director Miodrag Zivkovic.

JRS Serbia has a long cooperation with the Ministry, moreover, project of Integration House “Pedro Arrupe” was started in 2017 as the respond on the low capacity of the state for accommodation and integration of the unaccompanied and separated children refugees and asylum seekers. In that time the Memorandum of Understanding was signed as the legal base for our cooperation.

Project Department of the Ministry has presented their future engagement in the Integration, Refugees and Migration issues raised in the Serbian society, and provided us information important for our plans for 2023.

At this meeting we presented our main accomplishments in 2022, funding challenges and how we managed to overcome them with the support of the ministry in a project approved by the IOM and in other issues we had in 2022.

We have passed thoroughly through the several topics:

• Normative and legal base of our cooperation, and initiated extension of the MoU with the Ministry.
• Functioning of the cooperation with the local Centers for Social Welfare and their Field Social Workers and Legal Guardian for the unaccompanied children.
• Organizational issues and referrals of the new beneficiaries.
• Financial sustainability of our work in 2023-2024 and in long term.

Next meeting is scheduled for January 2023, where the Ministry Department for Social Protection will join, and will be related to extension of the MoU and defining potentials for licensing of the social services provided by JRS.