As we all know more than well, the Hastor Foundation has stood out in the past 17 years of its work and activities for its carefully designed volunteering program of its scholarship recipients. All this time, the Hastor Foundation has been continuously working on supporting education, professional training, and improving its volunteering process. One of the extremely important, and perhaps the most important, aspects of volunteering within the Hastor Foundation is certainly the mentoring work of scholarship students with younger scholarship students. Trying to help and facilitate our scholarship holders as much as possible and listening to their needs and ideas, in the previous period we actively worked on creating a new model of volunteering at the Hastor Foundation.
The new model of volunteering, the implementation of which has already begun, in addition to mentoring work with students, will be additionally enriched with new volunteer activities, as well as specialized clubs. In this way of working, our scholarship holders, students of primary and secondary schools, will have multiple benefits. At volunteer meetings with their mentors, they will have the opportunity to acquire knowledge and skills that will be useful in their everyday life, during joint volunteer actions with their mentors, they will be motivated from an early age to do good deeds, spread beautiful human values, and will have they will have the opportunity to do useful things in their local community, and the opportunity to deepen their knowledge of school subjects and be as successful as possible in school through specialized clubs for different subjects and areas. The main task of these clubs will be to provide inclusive workshops and classes to scholarship students who have difficulties with some school subjects, and those who are especially gifted and talented in certain areas will have the opportunity to further develop their skills by working with scholarship mentors who will lead our specialized clubs.
With the aim of even more significant advancement and improvement of this type of volunteer engagement of scholarship holders, and better preparation of mentors for quality work with students, the Hastor Foundation, in cooperation with experts from the fields of psychology, pedagogy and education and rehabilitation, organized training for mentor coordinators in the previous period. during the next academic year, they will be in charge of improving the volunteer engagement of student mentors, and the trainings tried to cover all the important branches of science that are specialized in working with children of primary and secondary school age.
Scholarship recipient Irma Lipovac conveyed her impressions from the training, emphasizing the following:
This training was especially useful and certainly gave strong messages of support and motivation to us students as future mentors and coordinators of the Hastor Foundation. In addition, it has laid a strong foundation for every form of our growth and upgrading in this noble role that we will have in the time ahead. What I especially liked about the training was that it was like an open platform for discussion, where we could ask questions from various areas and in this way we managed to remove numerous ambiguities that we had. This is precisely one of the most important factors, because of which I believe that the training helped us to get rid of many fears that we had before it, and I believe that it prepared us very well for the new form of our volunteer engagement. I hope that my colleagues and I will carry out the roles before us as responsibly and efficiently as possible.
The main goal of this training was to prepare mentor coordinators to be better mentors to students who volunteer with younger scholars. Mentor coordinators are a new segment of the volunteer program of the Hastor Foundation, which is designed to increase the volunteer engagement of student mentors who strive to create creative and educational content for younger scholars every day. Therefore, mentor coordinators will have the role of coordinators who have gained a lot of knowledge and adopted new skills during this training so that the volunteer work with scholarship students will be even more effective.
Following the advice and instructions of experts from the above-mentioned fields, our scholarship holders are significantly prepared for the extremely responsible tasks that await them in the future. It should be noted that the scholarship students who followed the training and who will assume the role of mentor coordinators were chosen carefully, taking into account their interests, preferences, characteristics, and one of the important factors in the selection was the field they study. Therefore, the mentor coordinators will be an important support and help to student mentors due to the acquired knowledge they bring from this training, which will directly improve their monthly meetings with students. In this way, the cyclical transfer of knowledge to younger generations of scholarship holders is enabled, who in the future will be able to recognize challenges and face them.
Inela Hodžić was part of this training and as a scholarship student who will have the role of mentor coordinator, she highlighted the content and benefits of the training:
At the training session with the pedagogue, we had the opportunity to hear different ways in which interesting classes and workshops for children can be organized, we received advice related to keeping students’ attention, and we had the opportunity to learn techniques and methods for encouraging students’ critical thinking. Personally, these lectures were really useful for me, and I got more ideas and activities that I would do with my students, and which I will try to transfer to the mentors who work with their groups. The workshop with the pedagogue was followed by the workshop with the psychologist. In this workshop, we focused more on correctly solving the problems we encountered during our volunteering with students. In the end, we heard from experts in education and rehabilitation a lot of useful things that we can use in working with children with developmental difficulties, from approaching children, establishing contact with withdrawn people to devices and methods that we can use to achieve easier communication with children.
Taking into account everything previously highlighted, all the information that was conveyed by the experts during the training, the participants of this training will be able to implement in other aspects of their activities, but also within the framework of the future profession, which is why they will have multiple benefits. As we have already emphasized, they are prepared for responsible and important tasks and will play a major role in working with students. With this model of volunteering, we want to help students even more to develop their personality, work on themselves, create their dreams and recognize their skills so that in the future they will become more self-aware and responsible members of Bosnian society.
Finally, we would like to thank our lecturers: Irma Pašić-Muhović, Nejra Bašić and Selmir Hadžić for taking their time and holding this very important training for our scholarship holders. We want to point out that the held training and the new model of volunteering is not only a significant step for the Hastor Foundation, its work and mission, it is also an extremely important step towards creating a better and more promising future for our country, which makes us particularly happy and motivates us to continue working on education and improvement. skills and knowledge of future generations.
Prepared by: Almina Šabanović-Kokot
