European Voluntary Service for All Erasmus Project

Project Title

European Voluntary Service for All

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 youth

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2014

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Access for disadvantaged; Reaching the policy level/dialogue with decision makers; EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy

Project Summary

The project EVS4ALL aimed to take a first step in the implementation of a ‘European Year of Volunteering for Everyone’, as described in the manifesto “We are Europe! Manifesto for rebuilding Europe from the bottom up”.

Within the framework of Erasmus+ Youth in Action and based on the manifesto the project reached out for the following objectives:
(1) the inclusion of young people with fewer opportunities that are so far underrepresented in European voluntary services
(2) the involvement of and outreach to further stakeholders to engage in EVS in order to enlarge the capacities of volunteer programmes in Europe; as well as,
(3) the promotion of EVS, and specifically the idea of a more inclusive EVS, by using a widespread communication and dissemination strategy.

During this pilot project, 14 experienced EVS organisations and third parties (foundations and civil society organisations who are active in the sector of European and national voluntary services) from 6 European countries built long-term partnerships in order to exchange best practices and pool resources, experience and skills in the domain of social and mobility inclusion of young people with fewer opportunities. Based on prior experiences and an extensive analysis, the partner organisations set up common quality criteria for the inclusion of the target group in cross-border voluntary services.

As a first step, the partners prepared small pre-studies/reviews in their countries identifying the barriers to volunteering for the target group by taking into account the national realities of barriers.They engaged in consortium meetings and discussions with youth workers and experts, including with their respective national stakeholders, and analysed and evaluated carefully the experiences and gained knowledge. As a result, the partners developed guidelines for implementing inclusive EVS mobility projects to be subsequently tested in short-term EVS mobilities.
As a second step, the partner organisations designed together new European volunteer projects as blended learning activities which took into account the experiences and findings and which involved the foundations actively. The involvement of the third parties was looked at individually based on each organisation’s needs and possibilities. The partners aimed to explore how European mobility can be combined with digital learning and how that can be an asset for EVS projects engaging young people with fewer opportunities. Sending and hosting mentors of the involved partner organisations received a staff training in order to get to know each other and to plan carefully together the use of digital learning in short term voluntary services during the preparation, implementation and evaluation of the activities.
The EVS4ALL project was combined in this phase with further Key Action 1 EVS projects applied by the EVS partner organisations of the consortium in the different countries. Altogether, 20 pilot short term EVS activities for young people with fewer opportunities were prepared, implemented and evaluated accordingly.

Upon the completion of the EVS mobilities, Volonteurope/Volonteering Matters and IKAB-Bildungswerk collected and analysed feedback from the partner organisations by using questionaires and interviews with volunteers and mentors which resulted into two different outputs:
(A) Towards a More Inclusive Europe – The European Voluntary Service for All: A set of European Policy Recommendations aimed at national and European policy-makers, as well as National Agencies of Erasmus+ and national actors responsible for national citizen services, which set out guidelines on how to give more priority to young people with fewer opportunities to participate in the European Voluntary Service, thus exercising their mobility rights as EU citizens.
(B) Blended Mobilities – Discovering Digital Learning: A practical guide about how to use digital learning to support the learning processes of the target group in volunteer activities.

The EVS4ALL project employed a widespread communication and dissemination strategy: During the life time of the project, specific emphasis was given to the promotion and visibiltiy of EVS as such. The online publication “Volunteers’ Voices” documents the personal stories of the EVS4ALL volunteers throughout their voluntary service abroad to mainstream the impact of cross-border voluntary services on their sense of belonging to Europe. The project results were presented in six local/national multiplier events and one international multiplier event (final conference) to stakeholders from the fields of youth policy, civil society, youth work and media to multiply its impact on the current Erasmus+ programme and the future programme generation. Impressions of the final conference were recorded in a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cyugZAdWQk).

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 200522,67 Eur

Project Coordinator

IKAB-Bildungswerk & Country: DE

Project Partners

• Fundacja na rzecz Roznorodnosci Spolecznej
• Europe & Me e. V.
• FUNDACION ALIANZA POR LOS DERECHOS, LA IGUALDAD Y LA SOLIDARIDAD INTERNACIONAL
• Y.E.S.-EWIV YOUTH AND EUROPEAN SOCIAL WORK FORUM
• Allianz Kulturstiftung
• Chance for Life
• Itinéraire International