Created two decades ago in the University Park of Novi Sad as a student movement in the fight for peace and freedom, EXIT Festival has launched a number of socially responsible projects throughout its history. Social responsibility remains one of the key aspects of the festival, expressed through the work of the EXIT Foundation, whose activism is focused on youth development and the promotion of peace, creative industries, environmental protection, and destination branding.
Life Stream
EXIT festival, in partnership with the United Nations World Food Programme, the world’s largest humanitarian organization, has launched the Life Stream project. The project’s aim is to deal with critical environmental issues and help millions of people around the planet who have come to the brink of extreme starvation due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Life Stream was launched in 2019 and, together with the Green Я:Evolution, is EXIT’s largest environmental endeavor to date. The partnership with the UN World Food Programme expands the scope of this project, highlighting two crucial motives for action — ending hunger and building community resilience to climate change — which have become even more urgent in the face of the COVID-19 threat.
Green Я:Evolution
Green Я:Evolution is EXIT festival’s large-scale ecological platform whose aim is to mobilize the public in order to start mass afforestation in the country, the region, and the world. The aim is to plant over one million trees in the coming years in Serbia alone!
The first afforestation drive was carried out on Fruska Gora in cooperation with the EU Delegation in Serbia and the presence of the Ministry of Environmental Protection. The campaign was supported by the Fruska Gora National Park, the Faculty of Forestry of the University of Belgrade, and the Vojvodina Environmental Movement (Pokret Gorana Vojvodine).
Conscious R:evolution
On its twentieth birthday, EXIT festival launched Conscious R:Evolution, a platform that has brought together some of the world’s leading speakers, artists, scientists, entrepreneurs and activists to discuss the potential directions of both individual and collective human development. Numerous panel discussions and free workshops held within this platform can be found here.
EXIT strategy
In light of the pandemic’s severe economic consequences, EXIT has launched an international online conference titled EXIT strategy. Under the slogan “We create an exit from the pandemic together,” in several panels, the conference gathered some of the leading world and regional experts in the fields of tourism, culture, events, media, and other spheres of public life, who discussed the future of tourism and major events.
Mental Health
EXIT Festival has been promoting mental health awareness for many years – both the mental health care of their employees, as well as festival visitors. The recognition of this important issue makes us pioneers in the festival industry and we deeply believe that, when it comes to mental health, a new era has begun.
#StayClean
“Stay Clean” was the campaign initiated by the EXIT Foundation in 2019 with the support from the Ministry of Health and Telekom Srbija, and creatively produced by McCann Belgrade with the assistance of the Drive agency. The #StayClean campaign had the goal to point the young people, in a fun and simple manner, towards educational content regarding the dangers of narcotics, presented by the Committee against drug addiction in schools at the official website, Stayclean.rs. The question “Do you know where your goods come from?”, in a brave and intriguing way focused the attention to the detrimental consequences of taking drugs, however, it also shined a light at the unhygienic smuggling conditions that should make everyone pose a question of wanting something like that in their lives. The campaign offered numerous useful and easily understandable information about various narcotics and their influence on mental and physical health, as well as other content that included video games that show what parts of the human body are used to transport narcotics in a very unhygienic way.