Volunteering as a nonprofit activity that contributes to wellbeing and prosperity of a community, and activism as a community engagement, raises the awareness about certain social problems and works on their solutions, through implementation of activities and projects, represents vital activities of every developed society.
Aware that the youth of the city of Nis, lacks cognition about activism and volunteerism, and also willingness for active participation in a community, Club for Youth Empowerment 018 (KOM 018) will implement project “AktivNI”, in the period from September 2018, through February of 2019. Project will be done in collaboration with Youth office Nis (KZM) and four high schools – First gymnasium of Nis “Stevan Sremac”, “Bora Stankovic” gymnasium, the Gastronomy and Tourism school and the Mechanical Engineering school. The project is financed by the Ministry of youth and sport of Republic of Serbia.
KOM 018 is nongovernmental, nonprofit organization that works on building stronger capacities with youth, so they could take more active role in a community, that way contributing to building quality life to for youth in a local community and the community itself. Recognizing the upper mentioned problem, the lack of activism in youth, this organization will work on educating youngsters from Nis with terms activism and volunteering, through the project “AktivNI”, and also building stronger capacities so they can help do more charity work in a local community. The project is primarily intended for high school studnets, who represent the main driving force of every society, so we feel the need to empower them even more.
The project consists of several activities, one of which is training course. This training course, held on mount Kopaonik in October of 2018, gathered young people from the city of Nis – high schools students of the mentioned schools and KOM 018 volunteers – who acquired knowledge about volunteerism and activism, and how to use creative methods and teamwork in promotion of this terms. The main goal of this training course was building stronger capacities of youth for designing and implementing actions at a local level. Youngsters, divided in six groups, designed six plans for actions during the training, which they will implement at the local level – four of them will be in the high schools mentioned, one will be in Youth office of Nis and one in KOM 018 organization. Implementing the actions will be the next activity, through which will these young people, with the help of their mentors, inform their peers about the importance of volunteering and activism, that way including more young people from Nis in their work.
Main goal of these activities is that young people, with the help of their mentors, should become main drive force in a society that will have the impact of other young people of Nis, through designing and implementing these activities. Furthermore, the youngsters will develop the actions that they consider relevant for solving problems in their schools or city and implement them on their own. That way, they will induce the rise of awareness in young people in Nis about the importance of volunteering and activism, and educate them about the possibilities to volunteer, train them about creative methods they can use in promoting volunteerism and activism on a local level, thus raising the number of volunteering activities in the city of Nis. At the same time, there will be more networking between the high schools from Nis that will spark their further collaboration.
As the last activity of this project, the final conference will be held, where the results of the project will be presented.
