Micro-mentoring is a short, focused mentoring relationship with 1 to 3 sessions on a specific topic, skill, or challenge. You bring a concrete question or task; a peer from our network with relevant experience helps you work through it, and you're done in a matter of weeks.

If you are mentored, you get direct, practical input from someone in the GLC Alumni Network who has faced a similar challenge you're navigating: whether that's structuring a grant budget, preparing for a hard advocacy conversation, figuring out your next career move or trying to make an AI tool work for you.

If you mentor, you get to give back to the network, strenghten your relationship with a peer and maybe have a reflective look on your own work and approach through the process.

You can do both as each one of us has something to offer in one area and something to gain in another.

How it works:

Timeline: October – December 2026

*We encourage you to sign up early and we can start matching even before the deadline of October 20th and get people the help they need quicker.

Practicalities:

Convinced? Excited? Sign up here: https://forms.gle/916nk9dc8DnVJRqf6

For questions, reach out to Vladi at [email protected].

On 14 September, the GLC Alumni Network Board met online and made a few key decisions. First, the Board unanimously approved the 2026–2027 work plan, so the network keeps going through 2027, with Vladislav Petkov (Bulgaria, Fall 2013) staying on as coordinator for another year. Second, as the current mandate of board members is expiring, the Board itself is getting a makeover. A Nominating Committee led by honorary board member Elizabeth Balint and alumna Edita Bednarova (Slovakia, Fall 2016) will check in with current Board members about whether they want to stay on, and work with national alumni communities to find new faces if and where needed. Board members advise on the network's strategy and development and make a serious commitment to help with fundraising, communications and other strategic operations vital for the success of our network.

Want to help shape where the network goes next? You can either join the Nominating committee or express interest to serve as a board member. Reach out to Elizabeth Balint at [email protected] and let her know.

The GLC Alumni Network coordinator Vladislav Petkov represented the group at the Bilbao leg of this year's Community Organizers Forum, organized by ACORN International in Spain.

The forum also brought a reunion as Vladislav reconnected in person with Wade Rathke, ACORN's founder and lead, who has been a long-time friend of our network. Wade hosted GLC Professional Fellows in New Orleans in 2017 and 2018 and later visited Bulgaria twice to keep working with his mentees. He is still involved with the network today: this year he mentored virtual fellow Maria Getova as part of the Virtual Fellowship Program 2026. While in Bilbao, Vladislav also gave an interview for the radio program Wade hosts.

The forum explored some of the labor and community organizing happening in the Basque Country, including: ELA Euskal Sindikatua trade union, the community organizing initiative Alda.eus, the well-known cooperative group MONDRAGON Corporation, and a grassroots campaign against a planned Guggenheim expansion into the protected Urdaibai biosphere reserve.

"This was such a great exercise of international learning and solidarity", Vladislav said.

A team of Slovak alumni, led by Monika Steskova (Slovakia, Spring 2013), recently reported exciting news: the 5th edition of the PlaNET SOEN project has secured funding and the SOEN methodology will now reach Africa.

Monika explains why this news is very much connected to our network:

This project is actually such a nice example of how cooperation between alumni can develop over many years.

The roots of SOEN go back to the Professional Fellows experience in the US in 2013. I was really inspired by some of the community organising methods we learned there and later I started to adapt some of them to our local reality and work with young people in Slovakia to prevent brain drain from our region.

SOEN1 started as a really small project supported by Youth in Action programme. At that time I was mentoring our fellow alumna Dana Trombitasova (Slovakia, Fall 2015) and we started to build and organize an active community of young people in our region, very much inspired by what we experienced in US.

Then SOEN2 was supported through Alumni Engagement Innovation Fund (AEIF) and Miroslav Ragac and Maros Chmelik (both Slovakia, Spring 2013) were actively involved.

With SOEN3 Mirko became directly involved as one of the project coordinators and brought a lot of his beautiful sunshine energy into this particular project.

Later Martina Marekova (Slovakia, Spring 2023) joined us with SOEN4 and our cooperation continued also with SOEN5, where she worked very closely with me on developing the application for almost 2 months.

And I think this is really what I like about alumni network. Over the years different people become part of the journey, bring their own experience, ideas and actual work and somehow leave their own footprint there.

So SOEN is actually nothing but a GREAT long-term international impact indicator of a grant Elizabeth Balint wrote back in 2012.

A program that taught us how to organize communities and inspired us to put what we learned into practice when we came back home. More than 10 years later, we are still doing it, developing it and passing it further.

So to sum up: We all know it, that behind every successfull project we should look for Elizabeth hiding and smiling behind the corner.

Highlights from Central and Eastern Europe from the last two months, as curated by our
Political Task Force

This is a short abstract of the article “The Work for Democracy”, written by our US mentor Adrienne Evans for the Nonprofit Quarterly. Adrienne is the executive director of United Vision for Idaho and oversees the United Vision Project. Since its founding in 2020, the United Vision Project has reached more than 1.4 million people across 13 states and engaged in more than 107,000 conversations.

Our research reinforced what organizers, and democratic theorists have long understood: People are not simply searching for information. They are searching for belonging, connection, and purpose. Nearly 58 percent of participants primarily identify with a political or social group they believe is for people like themselves, while only 8 percent identify economic hardship as their primary political motivation. Material hardship matters, but belonging often shapes how that hardship is understood - and where people look for answers.

While rural and conservative communities comprise roughly 20 percent of the country’s population, multiple analyses estimate they receive only 6 to 7 percent of philanthropic funding in a typical year.

These are places that have long experienced a decline in local newspapers, civic associations, labor unions, community organizations, and other institutions that once connected people to one another and to public life. The result has not simply been economic hardship, but civic abandonment. When communities lose the institutions that connect people to one another, they lose far more than services. They lose the capacity to solve problems together. They lose trust. They lose shared identity. They lose confidence that democracy can improve their lives. (…)

Several years ago, a potential funder came to Idaho to learn about our work. About 50 miles outside Boise, we stopped at an old gas station that sold fresh produce, local goods, antiques - and Confederate flags.

I introduced myself to Randy, the owner, and told him what I did.

He looked at me and smiled. “Well,” he said, “I guess we’re on different sides of the political aisle.”

“Maybe,” I replied. “Let’s find out.”

What followed was a 45-minute conversation about healthcare, family, agriculture, economic change, community decline, and political division. At one point, Randy’s wife spoke through tears about losing loved ones while struggling to access affordable healthcare. (…)

None of these concerns fit neatly into the caricatures we often construct about one another. They were deeply human concerns.

As we prepared to leave, I asked Randy a question, mostly for the benefit of my colleague because I already knew what his answer would be. “What would happen if we walked out to my car and it wouldn’t start?”