YOUth can change the future for Kosovo

During the last three months, PLAY International has continued its mission to empower youth from Kosovo. Two new cohorts of 19 and 20 youth have been trained on how to become leaders of socio-sport games for children from their communities.

Both trainings were led by our fantastic trainers, Sumeja Osmani and Senad Ramani. Special mention should also be made for our program team, who worked hard to recruit motivated and interested youth and ensure that they would all be engaged in all the different sessions and then implement games in their communities.

The first cohort gathered youth from six different municipalities and the second one from five different municipalities. As in the previous trainings, this allows youth to build relationships with youth from other communities, cities, and cultures and foster their open-mindedness.

The aim of both seminars was to introduce the PLAY cooperative and collective sports games methodology to the participants. The trainers led the seminars in a manner that mixed theoretical sessions with practical work in the field and ensured most activities were interactive. This does not often happen in other organizations’ seminars that the same youth attend.

The implementation of the seminars went very smoothly since trainers have been implementing them for about two years with different cohorts of youth coming from different communities and municipalities. During the seminars, the activities carried out included collaborative sports games and workshops on the concepts of trust, diversity, inclusiveness, and socio-sport. The focus was also done on cooperative games. These games engage participants in the pursuit of a common goal without competition through three spheres of interaction: the relationship with themselves (the common goal can only be achieved through the contribution and success of each player); the relationship with others (players win or lose together); and the relationship with the environment (the number of points achieved, the time limit, etc.). That is why it is always important for the youth to have access to a sports field during the seminar to train themselves in implementing sports games and get direct feedback from the trainers on how to improve their implementation.

One of the youth trained said, "The theoretical part from the trainers as from Sumeja and Senad was very clear to us. They covered current topics that we face with children every day." Another one said, "I think that after the 3-day training we are ready to cooperate with the children and carry out the activities in the best possible way."

Since the training ended, participants from the first new cohort started implementing activities with children from their community at the end of March and the ones from the second new cohort at the beginning of April. Our trainers started visiting them to monitor that all the activities are implemented correctly, and it’s pure joy to observe that all children enjoy these socio-sports activities!