Key to Support Participants at their Active Citizenship Engagement

There were basically several interconnected needs we have addressed by applying for this project. As described in various needs analyses of International Voluntary Service organizations (IVS) and ...

The main objectives of the project were connected to the concept of educational spiral. As described in the project application, this spiral anticipates a long-term engagement of volunteers in different activities organized besides the classical workcamps, such as various types of trainings (in the role of participants as well as of trainers), short-term voluntary events, internships, establishing a new project, etc. This engagement would help the volunteers to enhance their competences and get better prepared for their personal and professional lives. At the same time, local communities would profit from the implemented activities. The capacities of organizations would be strengthened by creating a broader portfolio of activities and a strategy on how to work with returned workcamp participants would be elaborated. Ultimately, the attractiveness of the IVS organizations would increase and a stronger community around them would be created whose members would naturally play the role of multiplicators of the activities they were involved in.

Within the project, we implemented various types of activities, either in the category of multiplier events, or included in the learning/training/teaching activities, and outside of them, also a research. The research was dealing with volunteers’ preferences and consisted of a questionnaire survey and in-depth interviews. The outcomes of the research were used when creating the output document and played an important role for the organizations’ strategy towards the returning volunteers. LTTAs: One Day Volunteering, INEXup meeting, evaluation meeting One Day Volunteering enabled people to join different types of a short volunteering activity even off-season. This type of activity was introduced with the intention to catch up the needs of people who would like to volunteer during the whole year but don’t have enough time to join a multi-day workcamp. An action plan was created for the One Day Volunteering activity with a goal to diversify the types of work as well as the regions where it took place. Thus, a colorful specter of events has been organized from the social-oriented ones to the ecological, agricultural or some kinds of renovation. Other activities took place within INEXup – a start-up platform for experienced volunteers who decided to start their own project. There were several meetings of the active INEXup groups where they had an opportunity to present the progress of their projects, but also to promote their needs, such as searching for new collaborators. As these meetings were held as open events, anybody got a chance to come up with her/his own ideas and establish a new project group. Besides these meetings, several seminars/webinars for competence enhancement took place and the active groups were also invited to different events in order to provide them space for dissemination of their projects’ outputs. A great emphasis was placed on several post-arrival evaluation meetings, where new session plans focusing on reflection from workcamp were tested. These session plans are an integral part of the Toolbox output document (as mentioned below), that’s why their two-phase testing was essential for fulfilling the goal of the project. Each of the participating organizations was responsible for making a national evaluation meeting while all three of them participated in preparing an international one. Multiplier events: Campleader Abroad Online event The Campleader Abroad Online event acquainted volunteers with further volunteering opportunities within the educational spiral. The attendees discussed how the could be involved in the organizations’ activities and the biggest emphasis was put on the concept of campleader exchange platform. The purpose of this initiative was to gather tens of campleaders from different countries and serve them as a space for sharing opportunities to lead a workcamp abroad. These online sessions enabled participants to choose which virtual room they would like to enter as each of them was occupied with a representative of one of the IVS organizations which joined the initiative, prepared to provide information about opportunities to lead a workcamp in “her/his” country.

The main output of this project is a shared document which contains two parts: Strategy and Toolbox. The Strategy part is based on a sociologically-based research and deals with topics relevant to our need of involving returnees into more activities all over the year and creating stronger communities around our organizations. The Toolbox part offers a portfolio of different post-arrival activities, which are based on the needs described in the Strategy and are adapted by IVS organizations all over Europe. Within the research, we gained statistics and data about volunteers’ preferences, supplemented with a qualitative view into the perception of a selected group of them, both of which served us as a resource for creating a strategy on how to work with them. Thanks to that, we know what type of activities the returning participants prefer, what are the obstacles for them to join some of them, if they feel as members of the concrete organization's community and what to do to change it, what they expect from the organization, what can motivate them, what type of communication they like or dislike, and others. Testing the content of the Toolbox, we have already succeeded in attracting volunteers to join various types of post-arrival activities and, by that, starting building a stronger and more compact community around our organizations. New activities were developed which now stay viable even after the end of the project. As all of them are connected to volunteering, they have an impact at the local community level. An increased engagement of the participants after returning from workcamp leads to their penetration of the educational spiral described in the project application and depicted also in the output document.