Welcome to The Ideas Partnership, supporting marginalized minority communities in Kosovo since 2009, thanks to a great many individual donors and enthusiastic volunteers.
We’re helping the most vulnerable children off the streets and into mainstream school where they belong. We’re supporting their families develop the resources to sustain better lives. We’re helping their communities advocate and work for themselves in achieving fuller participation and equality. (Have a look at the bottom of this page for some examples.)
Our philosophy is simple:
we help people in need;
more importantly, we help people in need help themselves;
above all, we help people in need help others in need.
Our staff are all Kosovans. Most are members of the communities we work with. They best know the challenges. They are the best examples and role models of positive change.
One of the things our donors have said they most appreciate about TIP is how we work on the ground, among and with communities – in Partnership.
Thank you for being part of our community. We depend on [donors] and [volunteers] like you.
Our work:
We have three community centres in Kosovo, where we offer:
- Kindergarten provision
- Teaching for children out of school and mediation to get them registered for school
- Supplementary classes for children in school
- Girls Clubs tackling early marriage
- Women’s literacy classes
- Antenatal classes for pregnant women
- Access to hard-to-navigate government websites for families to apply for child allowance, energy subsidies, school supply subsidies and other benefits
- IT club
- Bursaries for university and high school students
- Young Leader clubs
- ‘Free Shops’ where families can ‘shop’ (without paying) with dignity for the clothes and shoes they need, saving these from landfill
Our achievements:
- More than 600 people used health or education services at our centres last year. Our services are provided free of charge, but it costs us 15 euro for a woman or child to access our services for a month
In the first four months of the Free Shops being open we’ve served 2610 people, and saved 4800 items from landfill - Operating in a community where child mortality stood at 41 in every 1000 babies born not making it to their first birthday, our antenatal care and midwife support over the last decade has enabled hundreds of babies to be born safely and to thrive, more than halving the child mortality rate among the families we work with.
- Seven children with severe physical special needs now get weekly dedicated support which we fund
- We are now working with the second generation of learners at our centres – adults who came to us when they were children are now parents of the kids at our kindergarten. Some of those who are now adults have gone on to set up their own advocacy and rights organisations; one of them is the first woman from the community to be a municipal counsellor.
- We’ve supported 34 students (14 of them women) to finish university or high school, with bursaries which the students ‘pay forward’ with volunteering in a field of their choice with their community each week.
- Many of the women who’ve accessed literacy education at our centres have gone on to be employed or even to open their own businesses.