History

YMCA is part of the big World YMCA family spread throughout 119 countries reaching over 58 million people.

Our history through the years

2001-2003

We started as a non-formal youth-led club, building relations with YMCA Skopje founded in 1999. Established YMCA in Bitola on 31.05.2002. We started with work on humble initiatives, as was the case with mountain hiking trips, ping-pong recreational competitions, etc. In 2003 in the National Park Pelister, we organized a camp for YMCA youth from Denmark and Macedonia. Balkan Camp in Nymfeo, Greece was one of the first activities with a big impact offering our participants exposure to camping and outdoors learning. This camp was run for 10 years by an international team of campers alumni from the Balkan YMCAs.

2004-2006

Developed several youth programs involving local youth volunteers such as: the Y-Movie, the fire juggling group Acid Triple, Y-Comics, NotifY newsletter. In this period we successfully organized the first larger international event Balkan Leadership Training #3 for 80 participants and the Balkan Program Festival – Balkan Mosaics with YMCA Europe with more than 130 participants from many countries across Europe.

2007-2012

We have joined the International Synergy Network for personal development trainings. Our YMCA team focused more on outdoor camps and training programs and has begun attending various outdoor types of workshops, personal development trainings and gained many active followers in the upcoming years. We organized a few editions of the Balkan Leadership Trainings in Macedonia together with YMCA Europe.

In 2010 we started working with the European Voluntary Service, cooperation with Peace Corps taking the responsibility for development of a summer leadership camp for boys YMLP (Young Men’s Leadership Project), we joined the Coalition of Youth Organization SEGA following up numerous activities in the field of youth participation and children rights until 2016.

In 2011 we become a national office of YMCA in Macedonia.

2013-2015

In 2013 YMCA Bitola received the annual award for innovative practices in the work with volunteers. In 2014 and 2015 we organized and co-organized several international trainings as part of the EU youth program “Youth in Action”. We became part of the World YMCA program for young leaders “Change Agents”, Together with other twenty youth associations, we founded the Union for Youth Work to attain recognition of the youth workers and the youth work as a profession in the country.

In 2015 we expanded the successful collaboration with the Peace Corps in the direction of strengthening the summer leadership camp for girls GLOW (Girls Leading our World) following the successful work on the summer leadership camp for boys YMLP (Young Men’s Leadership Project). The camp program of YMCA Bitola offered numerous camp learning opportunities in several international camps in The Netherlands, France, Germany, etc.).

2016-2022

We worked on our key youth development program GLOW-YMLP which in 2017 we upgraded by working on a network of youth clubs of alumni campers. We were awarded with National Award. During this time, we established the YMCA Europe Outdoor Camps Program that we had initiated a few years earlier and joined the Global Informal Outdoor Education Network and the Financial Sustainability Network.

YMCA Bitola was part of the first state-certified procedure for receiving officially recognized (within the framework of our country’s laws) youth workers! We also took part in the joint efforts to establish a local youth center in the Bitola Municipality.

Read about present day work