College education for 10 talented students in BiH

                                                                 BOSANA FOUNDATION

                                         Scholarship and Personal Development Program  

                                                                   Quarterly Report

                                                             October - December 2013

Executive Summary:

In the previous quarter, Bosana Foundation had accepted eleven (11) additional scholarship recipients that in this quarter we focused on assimilating to our programs, with our previous students and evaluating their readiness to succeed in the school year, as well as determining what we need to do to on individual basis to help these new students. Since our numbers are growing, and now we have thirty one (31) students, it has become even more evident that the focus of this quarter and the following year, will have to be geared towards implementing a more vigilant and systematic monitoring and evaluation of individual students, especially new students that are still trying to get used to their new obligations.  Several new scholarship recipients already were volunteers and they had no problem continuing with their volunteer obligations, while few of them still needed some time to find the organization and to adjust their school schedules to this duty. In all, since the school year started at the end of October and students do not start their exams until January, there is not much to report on student’s academic status.  However, we do have some interesting news about new fundraisers and students’ initiatives.

Students and Program Update:

New academic year brings new obligations and additional tasks for our students because they start new classes and with that also fitting in their volunteer obligations. When it comes to academic success, this has been a fairly calm quarter because they do not start exams until mid January. Therefore, most of our students focused on attending their classes, volunteering, some even decided to use these couple of months to put in some extra volunteer hours so they have more time for studying once the exam begin.  Some also requested to access the funds available for each student as part of their professional development to either sign up for language classes, attend seminars or purchase laptops because they determined that it was necessary to assure success in the coming school year. 

Here are some of the highlights of this quarter:

• One of our donors in Sarajevo, BIH has given one of our students an apartment for use without a charge.  This is a student that receives our partial scholarship (her housing is not covered); however, her situation worsened and instead of having to pay for her housing, we found a generous donor willing to give her an apartment for use.  In exchange, she helps our donor’s ailing mother with brining groceries and medicine. 
• We have mentioned that Nadja Kasumovic was a recipient of the Student of the Year Award for year 2013. Nadja received monetary award and she used this award to buy herself a laptop, which should make her studying and writing academic papers much easier.   
• We found one of our students a part time job during the holidays where she will be able to earn an income and ease the following few months.  
• One of our graduating students at the Art Academy also started a paid internship at a company where he was the head designer for one of the bags specifically manufactured for the Volkswagen.  They are currently in production and will be available for sale in the first quarter of 2014.   
• In December, one of our own students, Edin Serifovic, has shown an initiative and with his college friends created a project for first “Street Workout- park” in Tuzla and in the country of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The goal of this project is to change the bad habits that are so common among young people today, to help them start working out, spending time outside, prevent unhealthy life habits and diseases that inevitably will follow. This project already received partial funds from the local foundation, students are looking for additional sponsors and they are hoping to complete this project by March of 2014.

Program Fundraising & Financial Updates

In October, a fundraising event held at the Gymnasium Apeldoorn in Holland, was completed. This event was organized by a high school student originally from BiH.  Sehida Begovic was the girl that started this, and the goal was to use the 100^th birthday of her school for fundraising, and all the proceeds were dedicated to the Bosana Foundation.  The school managed to raise 6,628.00 in one day. They have sold food, jewelry, entertainment, etc. This event shows that Bosana is making an impact not only on lives of orphaned and marginalized youth that it severs but on young people all around the world.

Program Challenges:

As our number of students grows and our volunteer staff number remains the same, we are noticing a challenge in maintaining as close of a relationship with all of our students as we had in the past.  Their problems are many but fortunately, with many issues we have dealt in the past so we have a protocol to fall back on.  In addition, monitoring all students’ progress remains a challenge and so we need to standardize and simply our monitoring tools to assure that it covers all possible challenges and yet it does not take more of our time. 

The upcoming challenge in the coming quarters will be finding more resources for our professional development program, especially those students who are graduating this year because we want to make sure that we best prepare them for the world after college, including helping them become self-sufficient citizens with a job after college.