By Yasmin Abdul Latif
GOMBAK, 18 March 2016: If doing good things brings back good things to people, then it is simply the picture what volunteerism is all about.
Recently, our campus radio IIUM.fm managed to have an interview and a discussion session with the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of IM4U, Azlan Rudy Malik or Rudy preferable. The discussion is about volunteerism programmes managed by IM4U.
IM4U is a non-profit organisation that helps to nurture and cultivate volunteerism amongst Malaysian youth. Their focus is to instil the sense of social responsibility in Malaysian youth. It has been four years now they have been doing ‘The Reach out Convention and Celebration’ events.
According to Rudy, the initial objective of this event is to promote volunteerism to our youth through sharing of experiences by selected successful individuals as speakers as well as some performance from YOUTUBE artistes.
They are targeting youth at urban demographic and also campus students to fill their spare time with IM4U. Instead of chasing their dream in a very competitive urban markets they want them to just refresh their mind and look at how these people did to succeed and turn it into a motivation.
Rudy said speaking on promoting volunteerism amongst students in rural areas it requires some sorts of strategies. He said he focussed on English as the medium or language since the speakers are mostly international.
He wanted them (the youth) to be encouraged to speak up and to ask questions to the speakers. The other strategy is to choose speakers who have relations with popular cultures that can make them easily recognised and acknowledged.
Asked about what sorts of volunteerism work they do, Rudy said, œWe started from simplest category until the hard one, doing gotong-royong by cleaning up the mess until some people said that we are the cleanser people.
However, Rudy said cleaning up is just one of the things they did. They also went to the point of social entrepreneurship where they own a radio station and the profit from it goes to their dream fund. They also volunteered to teach kids and helped with the refugees who came to our country.
In collaboration with the Ministry of Education, IM4U had managed to establish about 800 outreach centres including universities in Malaysia where IIUM is also part of it.
IM4U opens participation for volunteerism where youth can apply for any volunteerism project by filing up the online form. Once they get approval they will receive the fund and some guidance from IM4U to conduct volunteering activities using the effective ways.
œIn volunteering, we never force people but we want to encourage you so you do it when you want to do it,” Rudy added.***