Volunteering>Interviews, Opinion, Editorials

06.08.2007 Alen Jusufovic’s story, by his own account, starts in 2005, when a girl from Poland told him about RIVER SEE EVS programme. The rest, as the old saying goes, is history. A very personal and, yet, very enlightening and universal story.

26.02.2005 The working meeting held by the Initiative for Legal Regulation of the Status of Volunteers in Serbia – IZVoR on February 22, a the offices of the Nature Lovers of Vojvodina movement, was seen as an experiment to gather the representatives of the initiative, the media and local authorities to present the results achieved so far and the plan for the coming period. Also, the meeting was designed to inform and provoke the interest of the public on the issue of volunteering and to involved all the interested in the initiative.

02.02.2005 The first years of transition in the Balkans saw the exponential rise in the number of NGOs. First came the international ones and soon enough the local followed suit. It is worth mentioning that the Balkans didn’t just join an existing trend, that is, as prominent third sectors existed everywhere else and then came to the Balkans since countries around here started opening. On the contrary, it is more likely that that we participated at equal footing in the emergence of a new global phenomenon, often referred to nowadays as the international civil society.

07.12.2004 The Volunteer Centre, as one of the programmes active under the auspices of the Centre for Development of the Non-Profit Sector (CRNPS), has been active for six years. It is the first centre in Serbia that works on promotion and development of volunteer work, education of organizations that wish to include volunteers in their activities, as well as orientation and training of volunteers for work in organizations.

29.11.2004 Recent times seem to have enhanced the validity of the outworn phrase that most important things in life are not taught at school. The ever faster changing face of the economy is imposing demands of skills and knowledge to which the formal and sizeable educational systems are less and less in a position to respond. The classical criticism of education and training as not being adapted to the demands of the market is reinventing itself multidimensionally as the pace of new technologies imposes need for adaptation on almost daily basis.

13.07.2004 If you mention volunteer work to a young person, all the chances are he/she will immediately think of exploitation and unpaid work. That it, indeed, the philosophy underlying volunteering, but in addition to the “exploitation”, the young have a chance to acquire skills and knowledge that are not available in the regular education.

12.07.2004 Even though not necessarily recognized as such, voluntarism has been an important part of Kosovo’s history. In the communist period, a considerable amount of construction was done on a voluntary basis. During the Milosevic era, Kosovo Albanians relied on voluntarism to survive and in the post conflict period, people from minority communities, facing harsh living conditions and limited freedom of movement, also benefit from the help of volunteers. Volunteerism has then helped keep people together, it has helped to organize people, to create social coherence and it has certainly helped reduce hardship across all ethnic groups.

09.07.2004 Accordingly, volunteering as an activity of the youth based, above all, on the good will and personal choice, is not directly regulated by the legislation. Indirectly, this legislative could apply to the volunteers, having in mind that it is rather competent in providing for the right of the persons that decided to get involved in voluntary work and activities. In fact, the volunteers have both health and social insurance and allowances during the volunteering period.