We continue to work with children who are sponsored from Finland, through the organisation Fida International. We regularly have workshops for children, teens and also the mothers. For International Women's day in March, we had a lovely workshop for the children aged 6-12, where we made cards for their mothers or sisters or grannies:
And one of our workshops for teens 13-18 focused on emotions and strategies to help them to deal with them. Our teens and the volunteers who mentor them:
We also have to do regular reporting to Fida and it is always so encouraging to see how we are doing. The project cycle is 4 years and 2025 is the last year of this cycle. In 2021, we wrote goals that we wanted to achieve: amount of workshops run and amount of people present, and the amazing thing is that in 2024, we managed to achieve all of the goals we thought we would only do in 2025!
We are also in the process of writing new project plans and it is exciting to dream with God what we want to put into practice in the next 4 years...
(The project report is for us and Prijedor, so we didn't do all of these things! But hopefully it will encourage you as much as it encouraged us!)
In 2024, the Child Sponsorship Project in Banja Luka and Prijedor continued to grow, providing vital support in education, healthy families and volunteer engagement. We held over 50 educational, health, creative, and life skills workshops, alongside over 150 tutoring sessions, and over 30 reading clubs, biblical workshops and drama clubs. For our parents we organised 9 seminars and our volunteers enjoyed over 30 seminars or debriefings just for them. More than 690 direct beneficiaries participated, with an indirect impact reaching over 1,000 people.
Volunteer involvement was a key area of growth in 2024, with 42 local and 73 foreign volunteers contributing nearly 1,500 volunteer hours overall. We saw a core group of dedicated volunteers taking greater ownership, starting to organize workshops, and actively helping to shape the project. Networking expanded through new partnerships with other organizations, while continuing old cooperations, all allowing us to offer more meaningful activities to all our beneficiaries.
One of the most encouraging developments was seeing our long-term investment bear fruit—whether in the lives of children making progress in school, parents engaging more in their children’s education, or volunteers growing in confidence and leadership. Despite challenges such as new government regulations affecting NGOs, we remain committed to adapting, growing, and making a lasting impact in the communities we serve.
