The Volunteer of the Year 2021 was our EU Aid volunteer working in Turkey, Martin Pavelka. Our volunteer Dominique was also nominated and honoured.
Our volunteer Martin Pavelka won the „Heart on the Palm“ award in the category „Volunteer helping abroad in 2021“.
Martin worked for 2.5 years as an EU Aid volunteer in Turkey Small Projects Istanbul, where he worked to help Syrian refugee families. As a project coordinator, he implemented projects focusing on non-formal education, psycho-social support and social inclusion. Alongside this, he managed a team of fifty local and international volunteers and was also involved in marketing support for a social enterprise Muhra, in which Syrian refugee women made traditional jewellery, accessories and clothes with their own hands.
Martin has a lot of experience in volunteering and this was not his first volunteering placement. In 2018 we sent him to Georgia, where he spent a year as a SlovakAid volunteer in the organisation For Better Future.
We are very happy to be able to send Martin again, but we are much more pleased that from this month he will become a full-fledged member of our ADRA team and will work as a Project and Communications Manager. Congratulations, Martin, and welcome to the team!
Tonight our volunteer Dominique, who has been working as a SlovakAid volunteer for 6 months in a partner organization, was also honored. ADRA Serbia, where it supported projects aimed at homeless people. Congratulations, Dominique!
As part of the „Heart on the Palm“ awards, our volunteers were also invited to the Presidential Palace where they participated in an informal meeting with President Zuzana Čaputová. During the half-hour meeting, which included a presidential speech, the volunteers had the opportunity to talk to the President and present their projects and initiatives.
The „Heart on the Palm“ award has been given to 3 of our SlovakAid volunteers in the past - Andrij Dichtyaruk, who worked in Moldova on the agri-food incubator project and the development of the Moldovan countryside, and volunteer Veronika Zimova, who worked in Albania on projects to support the education of children from excluded communities and improve their chances of a better life, and Samuel Čellár, who helped poor farming families in Kenya to build their self-sufficiency and enable their children to get an education by supporting the fair sale of sesame. The awards they have received are a great tribute to our work as well.
Thank you to the organisation CARDO - National Volunteer Centre for organizing this visit as well as the Volunteer of the Year event itself, and we wish the Platform of Volunteer Centres and Organisations, which will take over the organization of this award from next year, every success.
You can meet Martin and Dominique this Thursday at 6 p.m. at our ADRA dinner in Community centre Escape.
EN 
SK