Inclusive Methods in Professional Volunteering in Europe Erasmus Project

Project Title

Inclusive Methods in Professional Volunteering in Europe

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for adult education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2018

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Disabilities – special needs; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; International cooperation, international relations, development cooperation

Project Summary

Volunteering has a positive impact on economic development, social inclusion, and volunteers as individuals. It contributes to the social connections, and explores its role in helping to foster civic engagement as well as delivering public goods. Through volunteering community can become more cohesive, safer, and stronger. On a personal level volunteering can improve the life and career paths of individual volunteers, as it has the power of increasing their self-esteem, enhancing various skills and capacities, and becoming healthier physically and mentally. Through volunteering social isolation can be reduces, as volunteers become more involved with and in the community.
But even if the positive impact of volunteering in the field of social inclusion and its empowering effects on individuals are clear, all across Europe disadvantaged target groups, especially disabled people, are less likely to volunteer. The reasons are manifold: people with disabilities don’t volunteer due to barriers of access and lack of opportunities, as well as a lot of disadvantaged see volunteering as a less than desirable alternative to paid work. Some also associate volunteering with stigma, as they already have less opportunities of obtaining paid employment. So the opportunities and the value volunteering are not used to its full potential by and for people with disabilities. But with the right understanding, awareness and support from volunteer managers and organisations, those with additional needs can bring a broad and often unique range of skills and experience as committed volunteers.
Driven by the strong belief, that everyone, regardless of age, culture, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, social status or disability, is able to volunteer and should have the opportunity to do so, 4 non-profit organisations from 4 different countries representing expertise in volunteer work or working with people with disabilties formed this partnership “Improve”. Together they want to identify and develop methods and ways to promote “Inclusive volunteering”. Their joint vision is, that disabled persons, especially with mental or learning disabilities, will participate actively in volunteering and not just being “objects” of volunteering. Volunteering can help people living with a disability to recognise and improve their existing skills, and develop new ones. This is important for disabled people who are often made to feel as though they can only be the recipients of care rather than active contributors. Volunteering can turn this perception around and focuses on people’s strengths and abilities. Therefor Volunteering is also a powerful social tool of inclusion: it introduces disabled people to new networks, experiences, and learning opportunities. They also gained key employment skills such as time management, communications and working in a team, or learn new “professional” skills like service, retail, gardening etc. – depending on the volunteer work they are involved in. Additionally volunteers with a disability find that volunteering is a way of ‘repaying’ and reciprocating the help they have received. In this way inclusive volunteering also raises the profile of disability in a positive way in everyday life.
This positive impact of volunteering is the joint vision and practical experience of the involved partners, but it is not the reality for most disabled people yet. So the partners involved want to share their experiences and expertise in order to identify ways, methods and strategies to improve the participation of people with disabilities in volunteering, and to create an inclusive environment for volunteering.

The result of this transnational IMProVE project will be an E-Book including an input on inclusive volunteering, the learning results between project partners, on how to engage people with disabilities in the community, the barriers and succes factors of inclusive volunteering, the benefits of inclusive volunteering, the impact it has on local communities and individuals, recommendations on how to implement inclusive volunteering, and of course many concrete examples of good practice. This E-Book will be disseminated on local, regional, national and international level in order to inspire many volunteer organisations and organisations working with people with disabilities, but also individuals to use volunteering as a powerful pathway into social inclusion.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 52645 Eur

Project Coordinator

Dobrovolnické centrum, z.s. & Country: CZ

Project Partners

• CERCIOEIRAS, CRL
• ATEMPO BETRIEBSGESELLSCHAFT MBH
• Gemeinsam leben und lernen in Europa e.V.