Mental Health Work in Kosovo by Dorina G

I am Dorina Gllogjani and I have been part of the YMCA for 4 years from now.  In this road, I have been involved in different programs and projects in and outside of Kosovo. But I can definitely say that there are two moments that I cherish the most during these experiences.

My first international experience with the YMCA was in England and in this training I have had the chance to hear for the first time that there are YMCA’s in the World that have different programs for mental health. Since I have studied psychology and I have worked for some years with children with autism, I have always been familiar with the discrimination, prejudice, and stigmatisation that this part of society faces in my country. And this was the exact moment when I know that this is what I want to do in the YMCA.

In our YMCA we have been very careful and have paid great attention for the mental health of young people with whom we have worked with, taking care to provide them with a place where they will feel secure and themselves and we always asked them how they are and how do they feel.  We also have participated and we have promoted the “I am whole” campaign, as a sign of support and to stand against the stigma that surrounds mental health.  Through this time I was also part of some researches that we have delivered to ask and understand the situation of young people in the cities where we work and we also asked them about their mental health. This and other data have shown us the need to work more in this regard, and of course, I had to be part of this.

After a lot of discussions we have decided to start a project in which we will start talking with young people about mental health, and together with them, we will start to work on the direction of normalising these conversations and working to break the stigma and negative language surrounding it. We planned to start this on 10th of October on the World Mental Health Day with our participation on the #WholeHour Activity.  



During the time we were preparing to start this project I have had the chance to be part of training organized by the World YMCA called “Innovation Camp”.  After four years in the YMCA finally, I had the chance to be part of a World YMCA program, which made me very excited about this participation after all the great things that I heard around this.

This training had different workshops in five topics such as Mental Health, Environment, Youth Empowerment, Mentoring (Plus One)  and TenSing. And of course, I was part of the Mental Health one.

I think that this opportunity came to me at the right moment when I needed the most to hear about other people experiences and knowledge on this topic. In this workshop, we were people from different YMCA’s who are willing to implement a project on this topic after we will be back in our countries. Our training was based on the experience from YMCA Vancouver “YMCA Mindfulness Program”, which is a program for young people to learn healthy coping tools to manage anxiety.
This training was very motivated and useful to me and the work that I do since I had the chance to learn from different experiences that we shared, starting from our amazing trainer Sarah and all other participants in these workshops.  A very important moment of this experience has been also meeting the incoming Secretary-General of World YMCA Mr. Carlos Sanvee Madrij where he shared that one of the topics that his work will be focused at as WORLD YMCA leader is mental health of young people.




After this wonderful four days of training, knowledge and new friendships I came home with a lot of motivation and ready to start working with what I wanted the most.

We have started our journey as we have planned to be part of Whole Hour were we encouraged young people to take a whole hour for themselves on the World Mental Health Day, the same day we launched our “I am whole” campaign together with our Ambassador of this campaign Florent Abrashi which is a famous singer in Kosovo. I was very happy that Florent was very positive and joined our campaign and was willing to share his own personal stories and struggles. We have been also invited to different national TV channels to share and promote this campaign.





After we came back home with the help of the Municipality and World YMCA we started this new project for mental health. We had more than 50 young people that were involved in this 8-week training and we had very interesting discussions and topics, in this training we had the chance to speak more about topics that concern young people regarding mental health such as stress, anxiety, depression, happiness, etc.

I am very glad that we offered this chance to this group of young people but I am also looking forward to what’s next for them and for me.


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