#8 Eva Shimaj. The story about youngsters & NGO Community Management. Albania 🇦🇱
- Alla Zhdan / Алла Ждань
- May 2
- 8 min read
Eva Shimaj is a Community person with a strong social development and community engagement background. She fosters connections and positively impacts local communities, and I’m happy that she joined the Community Media project as one of the Community Managers from 42 European countries.
And I have a chance to share her story with you! The country she is living in is Albania! 🇦🇱I was there in 2021 with my friends (it seems so long ago), and Eva and I connected online. I was genuinely inspired by her focus on long-term impact and her desire to be an excellent example for the young women from northern Albania.
Check out the interview below!
Alla: Hi Eva! I'm happy I found you on LinkedIn. Tell a bit about your Community Management experience: how did you become a Community Manager?
Eva: Since I was a student, I was involved with student movements and youth groups, where we tried to empower young people’s voices and create youth-centered safe spaces. After I finished my university, I went on to find “serious jobs” such as working in a bank for a while or in an international company, but I always felt like my skills were being wasted on making profits for people I did not like.
I was lucky to have the opportunity to do a master’s degree abroad, which gave me a bit of a break and time to self-reflect on what I wanted to do. Equipped with the confidence that a master’s degree in the UK gives you, when I returned to Albania in 2022, I dared to directly contact SDI (Social Development Investment) and tell them: “I want to work for you!”. SDI is an Albanian NGO that works primarily with women and rural youth, two underserved groups that struggle to find employment, capital, and opportunities, especially in rural areas and particularly in the north of Albania (the poorest region).
SDI attracted me because they aimed for sustainable interventions that equip people with skills and resources necessary to empower themselves from within. I could see that their work had an impact on the communities they worked on, something that was lacking in the organisations I was involved as a student. In January 2024, I moved to one of the small towns in northern Albania to be closer to the community and establish the Digital Roots centre in Tropoja, which offers education and employment opportunities for young people in town.
Since the north of Albania has experienced a massive brain drain in the last decade or so, our work is focused on reversing that and creating attractive job opportunities for young people so they don't have to emigrate abroad or move to the capital. The future of these towns is in the hands of the young people who decide to build their lives here, and we want to create opportunities for them to do so.
I feel like I am at the right place, doing something impactful and necessary, and I feel content with myself that this is how I put my business degree to use. I thought I had to compromise my values and principles to make a living, but I found I could integrate my desire to serve the community into my career path, and I am happy where it has taken me.
Alla: What communities have you worked with?
Eva: When I started out, I was mostly focused on students and young people in general (as a student and a young person myself). Since joining SDI, I have had the opportunity to work with more than 300 female artisans across the country, designing capacity-building programs for them and identifying market opportunities for their small enterprises. I have collaborated with their families, local government, businesses, media, and international organisations to empower the artisan sector and provide financial independence for the women involved.
Since being engaged with the Digital Roots project, I have worked with and for young people of Tropoja and Kukesi (north of Albania), and it has been incredible to witness their growth just in the last year. I found myself being a teacher and a mentor to young people looking for hope, and I felt the huge responsibility of that position.
Living in Tropoja for more than a year now has given me the opportunity to belong to a small-town community (a huge difference from living in the capital) and to contribute to the development of this community beyond the Digital Roots project. I have been involved in a few community actions and movements since moving here, including:
helping stray animals,
promoting sustainable tourism and
organising social and cultural events in town.
For the first time ever, I feel like I am directly in touch with the community, their needs and I am able to collaborate with other community members to find solutions and positive developments.
Alla: As a Community Manager what are your core responsibilities?
Eva: My responsibilities are many but I can summarize them as follows:
Oversee and manage community-building initiatives to foster engagement and collaboration.
Develop and implement digital strategies to enhance community participation.
Coordinate regional operations for two centers in Tropoja and Kukës, ensuring alignment with organizational goals.
Build and maintain relationships with stakeholders, partners, and local communities.
Facilitate workshops, events, and digital literacy programs for community members.
Alla: What soft skills are essential for a community manager, in your opinion? What are the top 3 soft skills for a Community Manager?
Eva: I can give you 9:
Emotional Intelligence
Empathy
Active listening
Humbleness
Critical Thinking
Responsibility
Sustainability
Caring for all living things
Camaraderie
The first three listed here are the most important because they are essential to working with others and building community. Emotional intelligence, empathy and active listening are crucial to establishing and maintaining good collaboration with people from different backgrounds, different mindsets and different interests.
Alla: And what about the hard skills that are important for a Community Manager, in your opinion?
Eva: I would say it depends on the type of community work you are involved in, but either way computer and digital literacy is universally needed in any type of work. Communication skills and public speaking are also essential skills to build relationships with different stakeholders. Planning, coordination, financial management and risk assessment are important for project implementations.
Alla: What top 5 tools do you use regularly, and how do they help you do your job faster or more efficiently?
Eva: My top 5 are:
Google Calendar + notebooks: I have a couple of notebooks for different projects. I check my Google calendar every day to plan my day/week and keep myself organised and focused.
Canva - for presentations and visual creations
Slack - for internal communication with my team
Calendly - to schedule meetings
Microsoft Office - for all my documents and materials
Alla: Are there any tools or platforms you wish existed that could better support NGO Community Managers?
Eva: I think at this point, digital tools are in abundance, but every community worker needs to find the right tools that work for them. Tools that help organize, plan, monitor and assess the implementation phases of a project. I always thought that social media exclusively for activists and community workers would have been fun but I guess Linkedin already serves that purpose.
If you are interested in other stories shared by Community Managers, you can check the one I shared about Open Source communities and awesome Jona Azizaj who is from Albania too! :)Alla: Are you a part of a team of Community Managers, or do you work with the community alone?
Eva: In the context of the organisation I work with, I am the only Community Manager, but colleagues in all our community actions support me. I mostly collaborate with senior management, finance and quality control. We don't have HR departments or many other departments anyway.
Alla: Do you feel there's enough peer support or mentorship for NGO community managers in Albania or the Balkans? How do you stay connected to others in similar roles?
Eva: I don't know what is “enough”, but I see myself and my colleagues get burned out often during this line of work, so more support is probably needed. Trying to solve problems in the community can be draining and often with low results, but sharing this burden with my peers helps. I don't have a big local network of peers to lean on, but I do have international peers with whom I share
Alla: What is your source of inspiration and motivation? Do you find it in you, your colleagues, your community, or your family?
Eva: I think the community in itself is my main motivation. Being aware of problems and issues that need addressing, is my main drive to do something about it. My family does not really understand why I have chosen this path (they believe I should focus on becoming rich 😂), but they are supportive when they see how passionate I am about my work.
Alla: Okay, but I’m sure that there are things you are proud of! What was the latest awesome achievement of your community that you helped to gain?
Eva: I would like to share two achievements that I am particularly proud of.
The first one would be expanding the Digital Roots program to another city in the north of Albania. When we started this project in Tropoje, many people doubted or did not believe it could achieve its goals, so there was huge pressure to make it a success and prove those people wrong (including our reluctant donors).
After a year, young people in Kukesi, Dibra and Has (other cities in the north) are asking us to open the program in their own towns. Our donors and supporters want us to expand to the whole of Albania. These are great signals that our work is creating positive change and I am happy to report that we already have created a Digital Roots center in Kukes, with the plan to create more in the future.
The second achievement involved a heart project of mine called Strays of Tropoja. Strays of Tropoja started as an Instagram page where I wanted to highlight some of the problems that street dogs and cats face in Tropoje (at the moment, there are more than 300 dogs (no idea how many cats) living on the streets).
Through the Instagram page, I was able to collect donations for sick dogs, find adoption for some of them and meet fellow animal lovers who want to help (after feeling like no one actually cared). After only 6 months of starting this small action, I organized the first-ever neutering campaign for stray dogs in Tropoje in October. During the one-day action, we sterilised, vaccinated, and registered 30 street dogs, with zero complications afterward. This was an immense achievement for our volunteer group and me, and it motivated us to continue doing this work and try for another campaign this summer.
Alla: That’s impressive; I wish you good luck with your project! And last but not least: what do you like the most in your work?
Eva: What I like most about my work is seeing the progress, the confidence, and the successes community members achieve because of our interventions. I love to think that I had a part in their success and that the community where I live and work is healthier, happier and more optimistic. I want young girls to witness my life and have the confidence to live their lives on their own terms. I don't care about having some kind of social status, but I want to leave this earth with the conviction that I positively impacted other people's lives and that is enough to see myself as a successful human being.
Alla: Yes! I support you in this, Eva! Thank you for participating in my project and sharing your story!
I had the opportunity to talk to two awesome Community Managers from Albania, and this is the second story. I'm related and interested in giving women a chance to provide a stage and highlight their ahcievements within the Women in Machine Learning and Data Science community. So, I think it's important to talk about such communities.
If you don't want to miss the story Jona in podcast format, you are welcome to subscribe to my Spotify profile. Enjoy the Community Managers' Stories in audio podcast format!
Learn more about my Community Managers' Strories project to gather insights from Community people from 42 European countries here.
Do you have a story, and I haven't "visited" your country yet [check the map of countries here]? Drop me a line on LinkedIn, then!
Comments