After finalising my Green Fingers experience, I straight away rejoined NGO OAZA for another volunteering project called Joyful Leadership. This time for a long term engagement which lasted a year. It meant accepting a more responsible and individual work that would be done in the most wonderful OAZA office space was filled with plants which made doing even the most boring task way more pleasurable than usual. Also, the people that accepted me in their space were even more wonderful. I’m very grateful to Jasmina, Branko, Filip and Mile
for their support during my experience.
Joyful Leadership is concept developed by a group of international experts including my coordinator Filip Brnicevic.
They developed an online course that’s available for everybody for free in the English language, which teaches all the most important skills that are needed to become a good leader. When I started this project, my task was to watch it all, and I remember how impressed I was with the production value of the videos as well as the amount of content that was included. I very much liked how the purpose behind its creation of it was idealistic, and the people behind it really want to have a positive influence on the world around them.
Green Fingers, for me, was all about teamwork and building relationships, in contrast, Joyful
Leadership was for me, about self-reflection and self-organisation. My tasks consisted of managing social media about the project (Facebook and Youtube platforms), adding subtitles, recording promotional material, video editing, designing graphics, doing some work around the office space and live streaming education events in the Joyful Place hall. My work was supervised by the proper expert in web development so I’ve learned numerous things about online marketing and many IT-related skills.
I think that my favourite thing was being engaged in the live streaming. It made me happy to provide a platform for people to watch the plethora of educational workshops and lectures, especially during the troublesome times of pandemics. Also, it was very satisfying to tackle such a complex challenge that required a lot of focus, multitasking and working under pressure.
All in all, I appreciate the experience that I gained thanks to the European Solidarity Corps and NGO OAZA. I believe that apart from gaining experience in the professional world and gaining a few soft skills I’ve learned a lot about who I am as a person and what I expect from the rest of my career and life.
– Subala, Poland
