On December 14th and 15th, YMCA Bitola hosted the third annual Impact Summit at the Continental Hotel in Skopje. Each year, the Impact Summit serves as an opportunity for YMLP and GLOW club leaders to showcase their service projects and explain the impact of their projects in their communities, and most importantly, it serves as an opportunity for club members to meet and reach out to other civic young leaders throughout Macedonia. This year, 77 club leaders attended the event in Skopje to showcase their service projects. Regional clubs were responsible for designing, implementing and fundraising their own service projects, including applying for grants from YMCA Bitola for any materials they required. Clubs this year had extremely creative and impactful projects including: working with youth with special needs, upgrading playgrounds, running healthy eating workshops and designing city murals among many others.

In addition to collaborating on service projects, the YMCA invited special guests from the Peace Corps to train students on topics to encourage clubs to keep giving back. Until now, these summits had one-day agendas, but this year we had two days to offer the following curriculum focused on:

1. Fundraising and development of corporate relations
2. Recruiting and promoting active engagement among clubs
3. Investment management
4. Product Data Management

From recent survey results, students were extremely satisfied with the weekend classes and events.

We especially want to thank our donors, the European Foundation for Democracy (EED) who supported our work with the development of the clubs, as well as our corporate partners OKTA: Tinex, SASA mine, Alkaloid, Pekabesco, Zhikol and other corporate and individual donors for providing monetary donations to enable our service projects and the impact of the Summit. We look forward to seeing all we can accomplish in our communities this spring.