United Nations volunteers or UNV’s have proven invaluable in the development work of Kosovo over the last 5 years. Blerim Azizi is among the current ranks of UNV’s classified as a national volunteer – or local UNV. What makes Azizi’s work so important?
Azizi works as a Media Officer for the
Kosovo Youth Volunteers or KYV, a project co-funded by the United Nation
Development Program and United Nation Volunteers program.
Since he started working with KYV in early 2004, Azizi has helped create a strategy to promote the concept
of volunteerism with Kosovo’s youth, especially in areas of social development
and humanitarian efforts. The Kosovo Youth Volunteers are involved in a project
that will help funnel Kosovo’s youth into volunteer jobs. Azizi
says the program is meeting with some success.
Azizi
“The promotion of this project started in June and until
August we had a series of one-day activities organized in different regions of
Kosovo. Within those activities, which were projects of regional youth centers,
they selected the volunteers from those regions. During those days there were
more then 300 volunteers who applied and participated in those activities.”
Since the very beginning of his assignment with the Kosovo
Youth Volunteers, Blerim focused on providing young people with a kind of
non-formal education while bringing them together during different volunteer
activities in different regions.
Azizi never worked as a volunteer
before assuming his job with Kosovo Youth Volunteers. He says his desire to
work in furthering the volunteer efforts in Kosovo has now become highly
personal to him.
“These projects are
established by youth centers and youth centers in various regions have
different needs. They prepare everything and we support them and then according
to the region we adjust the needs that need to be fulfilled. For example,
lately we helped UNDP during the Day for reduction of Poverty and our
volunteers were there.”
Through participatory workshops and trainings, Azizi says peaceful co-existence between different ethnic
communities is possible. Although, he concedes, this requires the participation
of all ethnicities living in Kosovo. Azizi says he is
adamant about involving different ethnicities in volunteer activities because,
in his own life, he recognizes the multi-ethnic character of Kosovo.
“During the activities
that we organized, Albanians were not the only participants but there were
members of other ethnicities such as Roma, Bosnians and others. Now we are
trying to re-connect with other centers mainly populated with Serbs. We are in
a permanent contact with them in order to incorporate them in the same project.”
The drive to incorporate all of Kosovo’s youth, regardless
of ethnicity, defines Azizi’s approach to developing
a multi-ethnic youth volunteer base.
He believes that the engagement of youth volunteers in
various project activities and their involvement in important circles of
business and government will provide Kosovo youth with relevant work
experience. Azizi also says that he is organizing
youth volunteers because he knows they have not gotten credit for their work in
the past.
“Another thing that we are working on is creating our own
webpage where we will have our database about the volunteers who have applied.
Our idea is that those who apply and do volunteer work, to receive various
trainings from us that will be very useful for them in the future.”
That was Blerim Azizi, Media
Officer for the Kosovo Youth Volunteers.
Blerim’s work continues - during December
he will be involved in Kosovo wide activities around International HIV day,
International Volunteer day and International Human Rights day, organized by
UNMIK, UN agencies and various NGO-s.
That is all for today’s edition of UN radio in Kosovo. Stay
tuned as we feature more interviews with those people not making the daily news
headlines.