Amaro Than Thinks Different.

Almedina has always believed that stories can move people faster than statistics ever will.

Long before she held any official title, she was already doing the work that now defines her role at Amaro Than: listening carefully, translating lived experience into language others could feel, and turning quiet moments of courage into stories that inspire change. Growing up between communities, cultures, and expectations, she learned early that visibility is a form of power—and that many Roma, Ashkali, and Egyptian voices were still missing from the spaces where decisions were made.

That realization became the thread running through her journey.

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### Finding her voice

As a student at RIT Kosovo, Almedina stepped into an environment that pushed her to think globally while staying rooted in local realities. It wasn’t just about lectures or exams—it was the conversations after class, the student projects, and the countless small moments where she saw how narratives about Roma, Ashkali, and Egyptian communities were shaped, simplified, or sometimes ignored entirely.

In that environment, she began refining a skill that would later become central to Amaro Than: translating complex social issues into human stories that people could understand and care about. She found that when she talked about communities only in terms of “vulnerable groups” or “marginalised populations,” people listened politely. But when she told them about a single student, a family, a grandmother, or a young activist—and gave them a name, a dream, a struggle—suddenly the room leaned in.

Her participation in the YES Program (Youth Exchange and Study) expanded that perspective even more. Living and learning abroad, she experienced what it meant to represent her community in a space where most people had never met a Roma, Ashkali, or Egyptian person before. Every introduction became an opportunity to shift assumptions: she wasn’t just “a participant,” she was a living counter-argument to stereotypes and low expectations.

Through workshops, presentations, and everyday conversations, she learned how powerful it can be when someone says, “This is my story, and I’m telling it myself.”

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### Storytelling as quiet activism

Over time, storytelling became her way of doing activism. Not always with megaphones or street protests, but through carefully crafted narratives, campaigns, and dialogues that changed how people saw each other.

She worked on youth-led initiatives, awareness events, and community projects where her role was often the same: find the story inside the data, inside the problem, inside the policy. She supported young people who were nervous about speaking in public, helping them shape their experiences into messages that were both honest and strategic. She knew that a good story doesn’t just describe pain—it also carries dignity, agency, and possibility.

For Roma, Ashkali, and Egyptian communities, that balance is especially important. Too often, narratives focus only on hardship: poverty, exclusion, discrimination. Almedina insisted on another angle: resilience, creativity, humour, culture, and ambition. Not to erase the problems, but to show that communities are more than the challenges they face.

That’s why her storytelling always moves in two directions at once: it advocates for change while protecting the humanity of the people at the centre.

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### “Let’s Talk” and the power of shared space

One of the projects that shaped her approach was “Let’s Talk,” an initiative built around simple but powerful ingredients: people, stories, and space. The idea was not to create another formal conference with rigid panels and long speeches, but to design gatherings where people could actually look at each other, listen, and respond.

In “Let’s Talk” sessions, youth, community members, activists, and institutional representatives sat in the same room—sometimes for the first time. They discussed identity, discrimination, access to education, culture, and everyday life. There were prepared talking points, yes, but the real magic happened in the unscripted moments: when someone shared a personal story and another person said, “I’ve never heard it put that way before.”

Almedina played a crucial role behind the scenes and in front of the room. She helped shape the format, design the questions, and host the conversations. She made sure the events felt warm, not intimidating; structured, but not mechanical. Her philosophy was simple: if people feel safe, they will speak honestly, and if they speak honestly, something real can change.

“Let’s Talk” was more than a project—it became a prototype for how she sees communication: not just as a channel for information, but as a space where identity, trust, and collaboration can be built.

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### Joining Amaro Than

When Almedina joined Amaro Than as Communications & Engagement Lead, she brought all of this experience with her: the academic discipline from RIT Kosovo, the global lens from the YES Program, and the grassroots sensitivity from community projects and youth work.

Amaro Than is not just another platform; it’s an attempt to create a living space where Roma and non-Roma meet naturally—through creativity, culture, and shared experiences. For a mission like that, communication isn’t a side function; it’s part of the core architecture. It shapes how people discover the platform, how they feel the first time they open it, how they understand its purpose, and how they decide whether to stay.

Almedina’s job is to make sure every message, every campaign, every public-facing word reflects that mission with clarity and care.

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### Strategic communications, human centre

As Communications & Engagement Lead, Almedina spends her time at the intersection of strategy and emotion.

On one side, she works on strategic communications: planning campaigns, defining key messages, aligning internal and external communication, and making sure that Amaro Than speaks with one coherent voice across platforms. She thinks about timing, audiences, formats, and channels. She builds calendars, plans content, and coordinates with the rest of the team to ensure that what is promised in words matches what is delivered in the product.

On the other side, she is constantly asking: How does this feel? Who is being represented? Who is missing from this story?

Her campaigns aim to amplify voices that are usually pushed to the margins—young Roma activists, local leaders, artists, educators, parents, and students. She refuses to let them be reduced to “beneficiaries” or “targets.” In her communications, they appear as partners, protagonists, and co-creators.

Every announcement, every story, every video is built around a simple test: would the people we are talking about recognise themselves in this message—and feel proud?

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### Engagement as a relationship, not a metric

In many organisations, “engagement” is treated like a number on a dashboard: clicks, likes, comments, time spent. For Almedina, those metrics matter, but they are not the destination—they are just signals.

Her approach to engagement is relational. She wants people to feel that Amaro Than is not shouting at them, but speaking with them; not simply collecting “users,” but cultivating a community. That means listening as much as talking.

She designs engagement initiatives that invite participation: calls for stories, youth-led campaigns, collaborative events, and interactive formats where community members shape the narrative instead of just consuming it. She encourages people to share their experiences, their challenges, their ideas for improvement—and she makes sure those contributions actually reach the parts of the organisation that can act on them.

In internal meetings, she often brings feedback directly from the community: comments from young users, questions from parents, concerns from local organisations. In this way, engagement is not a social media strategy; it is a feedback loop that keeps Amaro Than honest, grounded, and responsive.

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### Campaigns that build a cohesive community

One of Almedina’s core responsibilities is overseeing campaigns that don’t just raise awareness but actively build a **cohesive, empowered community**.

Some campaigns focus on identity and pride, highlighting Roma, Ashkali, and Egyptian culture, languages, art, and history. Others focus on everyday victories: a student graduating, a youth group starting a project, a local initiative fighting for better services. She carefully balances stories of struggle with stories of strength, making sure that the community sees itself as capable, creative, and deserving of more than survival.

She also designs campaigns that invite non-Roma audiences to step closer—without exoticising or pitying the community. These campaigns speak in a language of shared humanity: friendship, music, creativity, education, family. They show that all communities want similar things: safety, opportunity, recognition, and a chance to simply be themselves.

In everything she does, Almedina protects one essential principle: Roma, Ashkali, and Egyptian voices must lead their own narrative.

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### Building bridges across communities

Almedina sees communication as a form of bridge-building.

On one side of the bridge are Roma, Ashkali, and Egyptian communities, with their rich cultures, complex challenges, and deep reservoirs of resilience. On the other side are institutions, media, schools, and wider society—often misinformed, sometimes indifferent, occasionally open but unsure how to engage.

Between these two ends, there is often a gap of misunderstanding, fear, and stereotypes. Her work at Amaro Than is to narrow that gap.

She collaborates with schools to design communication that encourages participation and respect. She works with partner organisations to ensure that joint campaigns are not tokenistic but meaningful. She helps design events—online and offline—that bring people into the same space where they can listen to each other, not just talk past one another.

In her view, bridges are not built only with big conferences or official statements. They are also built with small, consistent acts of communication: a well-written post, a carefully translated message, a story that makes someone say, “I didn’t know this, but it makes sense—and I care.”

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### Making sure every voice is heard

At the heart of her role is one promise: **every voice deserves a chance to be heard**.

This doesn’t mean every opinion will become policy or every story will become a campaign. It means that the platform is intentionally designed to welcome different experiences, not just those that are polished or fluent or already “media-ready.”

She thinks about accessibility—language, tone, visuals, formats. She encourages the use of simple, clear language so that messages are not locked behind academic or bureaucratic jargon. She advocates for content that speaks to young people, to parents, to elders, to those who are online every day and those who are just joining digital spaces.

When she talks about “every voice,” she also means the quiet ones—the young person who is shy, the parent who doesn’t know the “right” words, the community member who doubts their story is worth telling. Through thoughtful design and encouragement, she keeps creating opportunities for those quieter voices to find their moment.

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### The road ahead

For Almedina, the work at Amaro Than is far from finished—it is just beginning.

She knows that building a cohesive, empowered community takes more than a year, more than a campaign, more than a single platform. It requires patience, consistency, and a willingness to keep listening even when the truth is uncomfortable.

Her goal is clear: to create meaningful dialogue, build bridges across communities, and ensure that every voice—Roma, Ashkali, Egyptian, and non-Roma—can find space in the conversation. She wants Amaro Than to be more than an app or organisation. She wants it to feel like a shared home for stories: a place where people come to be heard, to learn, to disagree respectfully, to grow together.

In that vision, communication is not an accessory. It is the path.

And walking that path, step by step, story by story, is the work that Almedina has chosen—and continues to choose—every day.