Although August for many represents the month of vacations and traveling, the Hastor Foundation members work tirelessly and are committed to the goal of expanding their great family. Still, we had trips as well, filled with more beautiful, more joyful, and more successful reasons. By signing scholarship contracts with scholarship students from elementary and high school, the Hastor Foundation has once again shown that it is the most successful foundation of this type in our area, having traveled more than 10,000 kilometers in order to successfully complete the admission of scholarship holders and the process of signing contracts all over Bosnia and Herzegovina and ensure scholarships for students, and in that way carry out its plan and reach the number of 2300 students in the next academic year. Throughout its 17 years of existence and operation, the Hastor Foundation has until now given almost 24,000 annual scholarships, and with its volunteers realized over 1,700,000 hours of volunteer work.
For many students, the beginning of the 2023/2024 school year will also mark the beginning of a new chapter in life because they have become a new and important part of our community. The everyday lives of our new, but also old scholarship holders will change greatly with the arrival of the new model for monthly volunteer work, all with the goal of improving social skills, guiding and developing the character of our scholarship holders, but also developing empathy for people from their surroundings.
Since its foundation, it has been known that, in addition to the scholarship its scholarship holders receive all 12 months of the year, the Hastor Foundation gives an opportunity to its scholarship holders through a carefully curated volunteering system to learn something new that will prepare them primarily for life, but also for their academic development. With their committed mentor work, our students prepare all kinds of lectures, presentations, and workshops, and they influence elementary and high school students in many other ways, and in that way, they are involved in creating successful leaders in our country. This is exactly how each individual in the Foundation is part of a puzzle that would be incomplete without any of the previously mentioned factors, and we all individually contribute to a better and more efficient way of realizing the Foundation’s goals and ideas.
In the entirety of the scholarship period, and through the volunteer workshops, we strive to create future leaders from our scholarship holders, improve their skills, but above all – instill positive human values and traits that will be a great relief on their path to personal development and improvement. Before all, we want to instill in them the qualities of nobility, humanity, helping, and sharing the good, which will remain embedded in them even after the scholarship period at the Hastor Foundation ends, and they will be able to pass them on to others in their community.
The monthly conversations with former scholarship holders show that the memories and people from the Hastor Foundation nestle deep in our hearts and stay there in all the years to come. The friendships, acquaintances, relationships, and all the moments created in the Foundation are deeply engraved in the hearts and memories of every scholarship holder through all life opportunities that are to come in the future. This is exactly the kind of relationship the Hastor Foundation strives to build year after year, and it justifiably says that all its scholarship holders are one big family.
Prepared by: Almina Šabanović-Kokot
