C-VET for Volunteer Coordinators Erasmus Project

Project Title

C-VET for Volunteer Coordinators

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 vocational education and training

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2016

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Open and distance learning

Project Summary

Volunteer Coordinators are the professionals who work in voluntary organisations managing the work of volunteers. The profession of Volunteer Coordinator is gaining recognition thanks to the increasing demand for this job profile. However, as many other new professions, there is a lack of high quality training opportunities. There are no specific educational pathways to become a Volunteer Coordinator. The work of Volunteer Coordinators requires them to manage volunteers which, by definition, are working on their free time and for no financial gain. Training materials from other sectors are difficult to apply to Volunteer Coordinators as those training materials do not cover all the skills and competences Volunteer Coordinators need. As a result, most of the training is provided by the employers, the voluntary organisations. This means that a Volunteer Coordinator employed by a big voluntary organisation can access to better training opportunities than those working in small and medium-sized voluntary organisations which represent the majority of the European voluntary sector. Therefore, the majority of employed Volunteer Coordinators have no access to training opportunities to acquire the skills and competences they need.

In this context, the objective of the project was to respond to the identified training needs of professional Volunteer Coordinators in Europe by giving them access to high quality training through C-VET. To achieve this, the project partners developed the first open and multilingual online training course for professional Volunteer Coordinators in Europe.

The online training course in six languages (English, Spanish, Polish, German, Italian and Portuguese) is available for free at www.voluncet.eu To access to it, please click on the flag of your language and fill the form. A few seconds after submitting the form, you will receive by email a link to access the online training course.

The online training course includes content for 144 hours of e-learning and it is divided in 5 units:

Unit 1: recruiting volunteers and providing initial training
Unit 2: developing and managing projects involving volunteers
Unit 3: organisational and human resources management in voluntary organisations
Unit 4: communicating and disseminating
Unit 5: networking and partnership building

Each unit includes several tools for the assessment of the learning outcomes. At the end, the users can get a Certificate.

The online training course for professional Volunteer Coordinators has the potential to be exploited across Europe because:
– It has been designed to deliver the knowledge, skills and competences commonly demanded to professional Volunteer Coordinators across Europe, and not just those demanded in one single country.
– It has been designed following the technical specifications of the ECVET, structured in units of learning outcomes, and the learning outcomes have been defined in terms of knowledge, skills and competence according to the EQF so to facilitate the recognition of the learning outcomes across Europe.
– It has been published as an OER (Open Educational Resource) under the Creative Commons license “Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)” in six languages so to make it accessible to professional Volunteer Coordinators across Europe.
– It has been disseminated across Europe and not just in the countries of the project partners.

The project partners estimate around 2.301.166 employed Volunteer Coordinators in the EU. This means more than two millions of potential users for the online training course.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 152128 Eur

Project Coordinator

Plataforma Andaluza de Voluntariado & Country: ES

Project Partners

• Stowarzyszenie WIOSNA
• SPORTUNION TIROL
• Confederação Portuguesa do Voluntariado
• SPES – Associazione Promozione e Solidarietà