Lisa Schäder and Jan Behrens (Germany)

Jul 11, 2016, 1:13 PM | Volunteers

We volunteered at Community Building Mitrovica (CBM) as participants of the German youth programme “ASA” from September till December 2013. The internship allowed us to gain insights about the work of a local multi-ethnic grassroots organization, to participate in various activities and, last but not least, to meet a lot of people and experience life in Kosovo.

During the “Inaugural Youth Conference Forum for Cities in Transition”, which took place from 23 – 27th September in Mitrovica, right at the beginning of our internship,  we assisted in workshops, panel discussions and site visits and met young people from North and South Mitrovica as well as other cities that are in transition from conflict. Also in December, we participated in the Dutch-French-Kosovar youth exchange “Active citizens: act in 2014!”, which was another very rewarding and fun experience.

Together with the CBM staff we joined a strategic planning and team building retreat in Durrës, Albania, where we learned more about ongoing projects, strategic decision-making and the future focus of CBM activities. It was at this seminar that we presented our own project idea, “Map Mitrovica!”. This project’s goal was to bring people from Mitrovica together to work collaboratively on an improved city map and to make them familiar with the online mapping project “OpenStreetMap”. We successfully implemented “Map Mitrovica!” through three workshops in which people from North and South Mitrovica participated. 

Besides these special events we spent our time with research, writing and IT tasks in the office, such as writing a report on the Youth Conference, creating a new website for CBM (Jan) or creating an assessment of Civil Society Organizations in the Mitrovica Region (Lisa).

As our internship took place during the highly interesting election period around the 3rd of November, we were able to gain a better understanding of the political situation in Mitrovica and Kosovo through first-hand experience.

Thanks to the great variety of activities that we were able to do with and for CBM we learned a lot about the situation of people, especially youth, in Mitrovica, and gained valuable insight into the work of civil society organisations in Kosovo. We appreciated the good atmosphere with the colleagues and recommend interning at CBM to any person interested in getting an inside view of a local NGO in Kosovo.