With a desire to support young people, their education, and equal opportunities for all, our team took part in a humanitarian futsal tournament organized by a special needs school “Milan Petrović” from Novi Sad.
To join the event, each team made donations through participation fees – and to make the impact even stronger, HTEC doubled the amounts our team members donated. The entire amount raised was used toward buying specialized Tobii communicators, designed to help individuals with serious communication disabilities communicate more efficiently, i.e., write using eye gaze technology. These devices will not only help students participate in educational activities more efficiently but also make their everyday lives easier and more comfortable.
Among many tournament games, one really stood out – a team made of one player from each of the ten competing teams faced the team of school students. Needless to say, they all won this time.
We believe that events like this are tremendously important, as they bring multiple benefits – they help raise awareness about the challenges people with disabilities face in their daily lives and promote sports, recreation, inclusivity, and healthy habits as something that can contribute to their general well-being. What may seem just an ordinary day to some of us can make a huge difference for these young people, and our team witnessed it first-hand. They did not hide their thrill:
We already had a chance to participate in some of the humanitarian events organized by this school. We had a chance to see first-hand what our visit meant to the users of this institution. How excited and happy they were to meet us. To see that all that these incredibly goodhearted students wanted was for people to treat them as their equals.
Knowing that, we had no doubts about joining another activity. We joined the tournament as players, bringing some fans along to support us, too. Some of us came with our families. The smiles on students’ faces really made it worthwhile, and we were as happy as they were to be there, to support them, and to learn from them about what really matters in life.
For the past couple of years, we can see the increasing effort of people in the IT industry to shape our community for the better. What we have done so far is just a tiny fraction of what we are able to accomplish. Let’s all give our best so we can keep going in the right direction.
– Aleksandar Miljković
Senior Engineering and Delivery Manager at HTEC Group
