Milena had joined the CID team in the framework of a ‘service volontaire national’

(mp) I started doing official voluntary work the 1st of December 2017. Although getting there was quite a process, you had to be certain that you wanted to do voluntary work and had plenty of opportunities to change your mind. I continued with the process, because the alternative was doing nothing at all which seemed like a less appealing option.

So now, I ended up at the CID | Women and Gender, an organisation that I personally wasn’t aware off up until this point, but maybe I should’ve been. This organisation works towards equality between the genders and is focused to convey this message through media and planned out projects.

I was intrigued when I read about the CID and it having an open spot for a volunteer. I can’t say I thought enough about how women are portrayed in society or how visible they are.

Since the very first day it felt as though the lens through which I viewed the world changed completely, definitely a sense of blinders being taken off.

I knew there were still issues in society regarding the treatment of the female gender, but I shrugged it off very often. Maybe we weren’t as advanced as I had previously perceived it.

Having had a decent amount of work in media analysis here and taking part in a lot of meetings, I now truly understand where changes must be done and that persistence is not a bad quality but outright essential.

The organisation that I work in might be small, but they are a team and have a well wired amount of contacts to other bigger organisations that work for equality as well or at least support the cause.

However we don’t just work for the rights of the female gender, we recently relaunched the « Book-case » project, which is actually more in the field of family diversity or patchwork family if you will. Coming myself from a different kind of household, I liked the project, it is important for kids to learn early in life that having different backgrounds or different circumstances is nothing to be ashamed of.

I have been well included in this project and have had plenty of tasks surrounding it, such as coming up with games that we could add to the case or finding movies, doing a small statistics template about Luxembourgish households,- which took forever but turned out worth it, even doing some phone calls,- which was a little nerve-wrecking up first but I got quickly over it.

Long story short: this placement here has not only opened my eyes and changed my point of view a lot, but also taught me how to work together and independently.