YOUth can change the future for Kosovo

Even though 2020 has been and perhaps will always be characterized as one of the most difficult years we modern humans have faced collectively, for a small group of youngsters in Kosovo, it would be the year where they have found each other and formed an alliance in a joint mission and passion of helping the future generations, the children of their country.

The vision behind this training is to bring together members of the most vulnerable groups in the country and empower them to become the youth change-makers in their communities, hopefully, aiding in community empowerment and education overall.

Kosovo has many facets of cultural diversity, each one more fascinating than the other. At the same time, the country has many facets of welfare cross-cutting through all the diversity, however, tends to overlap with certain particularly disadvantaged ethnic groups. In this context, three of the most vulnerable communities are regarded to be the Roma, Ashkali and Egyptian communities of the country. Given the patriarchal cultural roots in the region, even more vulnerable are the girls and women belonging to these communities. Despite social, economic, and political difficulties these communities face, we as an organization have always found the most ambitious and the most devoted young volunteers among them.

After a dynamic advertisement and promotion period, we were able to bring together a number of young volunteers from these diverse backgrounds, who expressed keenness on becoming active members and cornerstones for educational promotion within their communities. By enrolling on our training programme, these resourceful youngsters signed up to learn the cutting-edge methods of using sports activities and games for children’s education.

Our first pleasure in serving this enthusiastic group and commencing the training was in late December where we invited all the participants to meet each other and enjoy the volunteer’s day programme we had prepared for them.

Playing games and getting to know each other and the programme, the young volunteers visited the Gadime Cave, a famous natural history site of the country together. Within the atmosphere of the end of the year festivities, our young volunteers shared with us their wishes for the upcoming year.

We bet that Endrita’s words reflect the wishes of the millions of people around the world: “Seeing how 2020 has been and how it has blocked all our roads, I would love to see a 2021 free of the worries of this past year and a return to our somewhat normal lives. I wish health for all people and wish as much love, hugs, positivity and smiles as possible. I wish we only have to deal with pleasant things and the past be the past. We shall never give up!”

These 20 young volunteers will begin their training in March 2021. After being equipped with super useful and super entertaining tools, they will gather up the children in their communities and have some good, educational fun with them while promoting cooperation and mutual respect. Later this year, the whole group of youngsters dispersed all throughout the country, will come together again for a summer camp where they will be adding some more means to their set of skills which will turn them into an even more specialized young trainer for their communities.

We are immensely excited to continue growing together with our communities and are determined to maintain the shining of the light, despite all the darkness.

Thank you very much for your kind and generous support!

Like many other organisations around the world, 2020 has been an incredibly frustrating year! Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the government-imposed restrictions that were in place, all PLAY’s face-to-face youth activities were postponed from mid-February until mid-September 2020.

We are delighted to report though that guidelines and restrictions have begun to ease as the number of cases in Kosovo dropped, and PLAY was able to safely get back out into the community to conduct a first youth training for 2020!

The training was with an exciting new partner organization set up during the lockdown - the Lipjan / Lipljan chapter of the Kosovo Youth Assembly (KYA).  The training took place on 19 September and addressed topics that the KYA had identified as important to them during a pre-training needs assessment. The focus areas were human rights and gender equality, and aimed to equip the participants with new skills to implement socio-sport based activities with children. With these activities the KYA will be able to conduct fun and engaging advocacy activities to raise awareness about human right and promote gender equality.

As with all PLAY initiatives, the KYA also took away very practical skills which will enable them to organise and coordinate real actions on the ground for the benefit of their communities. But we don’t want you to just take our word for it so we had a chat with two of the participants after the training to see how they found it!

We started by speaking to Eurolind who said:
"We learnt to use methods with which every child can understand the essence of the topic and I think they are very useful because through play children have the opportunity to learn something easier. It is very important because sometimes doing something physical makes it easier for children to understand what it is about rather than to sit and listen to someone talking."

Then we had a chat to Laurita who said:
“Our goal to get general knowledge through sports is what our community needed, and I think it is necessary for this project to continue to be implemented in Kosovo, specifically in my community. I think the methods I learned from the training were the right methods which helped us to grasp the difficult things easily. And of course, they are useful, both in terms of developing knowledge about the topic of the training and in developing our other skills such as speaking, leadership, team work and more!”

The next step in the partnership is for the KYA to organize and implement an inclusive event for children in Lipjan / Lipljan, with the accompaniment and support of PLAY. They will work with children from local schools and neighbourhoods and use the socio-sport methods they learnt about to raise awareness about human rights and promote gender equality. And with PLAY, thanks to its long term presence in Kosovo and your support, the partnership will continue with further trainings on different educational topics in 2021 and 2022 and more opportunities to practice what they have learnt with their local communities – watch this space!

With Giving Tuesday just around the corner in December, and $1 million of matched funding on offer from GlobalGiving, we are encouraging all of our supporters to make a donation for 2020 and help us continue to support these inspirational young people in Kosovo to lead the changes they want towards a more inclusive society!