Strategic Partnership for Access to Volunteering

Background Young disabled people often face multiple barriers to being able to engage with volunteering opportunities at local and international level. This project seeks to engage with disabled and non-disabled people and youth volunteering organisations across the UK, Romania, North Macedonia and Italy to generate data that will aid our understanding of the reasons underpinning these barriers from the perspectives of youth and organization, to enable us to build information and resources that address data-led potential alternatives to current practice that are more appropriately suited to overcoming these barriers We will commit to improving our own professional practice in response to what we've learnt through our project, and share our learnings to contribute to the development of an international volunteering community that holds space for better disability inclusion. We will each undertake social research in our respective countries, and share our learnings collectively to build an image of the challenges faced across Europe, and go on to utilize this knowledge to design engaging and meaningful resources and toolkits that address and seek to overcome these barriers and mainstream better inclusivity in the sector Objectives We hope to draw attention to the barriers felt by young disabled people to participation in national and international volunteering programmes, and explore why few youth organisations explicitly encourage applications from disabled young people. We will seek to identify correlations and contrasts from both data sets (young people - particularly disabled young people and volunteering organisations), exploring ideas such as the 'perception gap' of difficulty bias often held around engaging disabled people, in an extensively researched report with accessible summary infographics for at-a-glance overviews. We will explore literature and national data to understand the extents of exclusion, and explore these within wider volunteering theory - specifically the academic, social and cultural benefits of engaging with volunteering as a youth. After this, we will collate a select array of appropriate resources to design a toolkit. We intend to undertake community testing with young disabled people and youth workers from across all participating countries to stress test these toolkits to ensure they embed better accessibility practice in a way that is realistic and achievable to the organisations, while meeting the needs of the youth. Implementation All partners undertook desktop research activities in their respective counties around challenges faced by disabled young people, building their own organisational knowledge of the statistical data underpinning disability inclusion. Going on to build a cross-national understanding of how this compares with the situation in partnering European countries through project based discussions and data-sharing. Thereafter we undertook social research, approaching around 200 targeted youth and volunteering organisations/networks with a survey via Googleforms (avaliably in multiple languages) to explore their experiences and perceptions of the disability-inclusion landscape. An unexpected outcome was a series of meaningful connections being built in-country with other youth organisations committed to improving their disability inclusion. Following our research phase we pulled together a comprehensive cross-national report capturing our learning in a way that we could share with the wider sector and inform change. We went on to create Toolkit resources that reflect the resource gaps identified within the report to support youth organisations to make their youth volunteering accessible to young disabled people at the time of force-majure. Achievements For IO1 we produced a comprehensive report and series of infographics exploring the realities of disability inclusion. This incorporated desk-top research and survey based social research into the disabled population of each of the countries, helping us to understand how disability is perceived and supported internationally. The report captured the responses of young people (particularly disabled young people) and volunteering organisations to drill down into the situation and to explore the appetite and ambition to build in improvements, allowing us to explore the benefits of volunteering to this youth community and identify thematic challenges and gaps to provision in order to target our Toolkit resources. Concurrently UK based young academic Louisa Moore completed an MA thesis around the findings of IO1, conducting a series of in-depth interview with young disabled survey respondents around motivations and aspirations for volunteering; bringing the research of this project into the wider academic record. At the time of project close work was underway by all partners on finalizing the Toolkit, with us having completed a series of resources including videos, quizzes, and template policies and began planning C1 testing activity