Let's Give a Helping Hand

Youth Leadership alumni in Trebinje are making a difference in their community.

In Spring 2014, students from the town of Trebinje were part of the FIUTS Youth Leadership Program with Bosnia and Herzegovina. After they returned home from Seattle, they used the skills they learned to plan and implement a service project in their community. Read this post by participant Andjela Cickovic to find out how it went!

It’s been a long time since our "once in a lifetime journey" has finished. We came back from Seattle full of great experiences, new ideas, wonderful memories, and strong relationships. First few days it was hard to get used to the old way of life. It looked as returning back to reality from the most beautiful dream.

The project in our small community was another part of the entire Youth Leadership Program. My YLP Alumni friends Vanja, Dragana, Dejana, Rastko, Jovan, our teacher Sladja and me decided to give our project a  name '"Let’s give a helping hand." The main purpose of this project was to clean our closed schoolyard as well as to encourage youth to get involved and volunteer.

We made posters to inform others about it. Then we made applications that students could fill up in our secondary schools. From all of them, we chose 20 volunteers to take part in our project.

We did our project in a partnership with "American Corner" here in Trebinje, on 28 October. It consisted of playing an Icebreaker game, a   presentation about volunteering, small workshops with a volunteer, cleaning schoolyards, and a presentation about stereotypes.

We put in a lot of effort but in the end, it paid back. The outcome was astonishing. Firstly we are happy that we encouraged our friends to volunteer, we all shared different opinions, ideas, and experiences. We all learned something new. We managed to clean up our schoolyard and to prove that we can do it if we have a strong will and if we unite. We made one step further, nearer, to our main goal which is to reorder this yard and make it a nice place to spend time on our school breaks. We hope we’ll do it soon and we promise we’ll let you know how things are going on.

Our project was followed by the media. My friend Dejana gave an interview for our local radio and my friend Dragana gave an interview for a newspaper ''Nezavisne novine." Also, some internet portals have written about our project. Here are links to two of the articles (in Bosnian):

http://www.nezavisne.com/nauka-tehnologija/okolina/Grupa-srednjoskolaca-uredila-skolsko-dvoriste-270614.html

http://trebinjelive.info/2014/10/31/trebinje-grupa-srednjoskolaca-uredila-skolsko-dvoriste/

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Great work, Trebinje team! Your FIUTS family is so proud of you.

The Youth Leadership Program with Bosnia and Herzegovina is sponsored by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, U.S. Department of State. Learn more about the program here.