Local Volunteers
Local Volunteers
Through a volunteer club that engages local youth from Sanski Most and the surrounding villages, we currently work with a group of fifty high school and college-aged citizens. The Volunteer Club provides CIM extra capacity in implementing projects such as International Peace Week but, more importantly, gives these youth the opportunity to develop leadership and conflict resolution skills in a small town that has few extracurriculars and high unemployment. One volunteer working with CIM since graduating university described the club as something helping them to “be the creators of social change in our community.” To date, our local volunteer club has seen a total of 300 youth participate since our founding.
Before founding the Center for Peacebuilding in 2004, Vahidin received a Master’s degree at the School for International Training (SIT) in Brattleboro, Vermont in International Relations with a concentration in Conflict Transformation. Additionally, Vahidin served as a teaching assistant in SIT’s Conflict Transformation Across Cultures (CONTACT) program, where he taught classes on forgiveness and conflict transformation. He has attended peace workshops and trainings throughout the world, including in Switzerland, the Philippines, and Nepal, where he helped to found a peacebuilding organization. In 2011, the Threshold Foundation honored Vahidin with the 5th International Bremen Peace Award, naming him the year’s “Unknown Peace Worker.”
