Volunteering and Organisational Development and Sustainability Erasmus Project

Project Title

Volunteering and Organisational Development and Sustainability

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 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Overcoming skills mismatches (basic/transversal); Intercultural/intergenerational education and (lifelong)learning

Project Summary

In this project, coordinated by Centre Culturel Espéranto Toulouse (France)., six organisations from the UK, Poland, Italy, France, Germany, Netherlands will actively cooperate on giving a significant contribution on the raising of the quality of activities focused on organisational development and sustainability for volunteer-based organisations addressing youth, with a particular focus on hosting and supporting volunteers, an area of particular interest of the participating organisations.

The main objectives of the project are:

– Facilitating the exchange of good practice among organisations from different sectors, backgrounds, experiences and scopes
– Empowering the set of education and training skills available in each organisation, thanks to international, intersectoral cooperation and peer-to-peer learning
– Facilitating the knowledge transfer within each organisation, thus creating more sustainable organisations
– Engaging more actors in facing the sustainability challenges relevant for volunteer-based organisations addressing youth
– Providing proper materials and guidelines reusable by other organisations
– Raising the quality of non-formal education activities related to organisational sustainability
– Creating opportunities for more cross-sectoral partnerships in a diversified, complementary and mutually beneficial perspective

The activities will be focused on exchange of better practice on organisational development and sustainability and volunteering (models, tools, methodological approaches, successful experience, lessons learned), peer-to-peer learning, collection of better practice, guidance, tools and materials, openly accessible and reusable by others.

The main subtopics related to the main project area will be organisational management, teamworking, hosting and supporting volunteers, how to train mentors for volunteers.

One of the main concerns of the consortium is the skill empowerment of their active volunteers, filling the gap of the skill-mismatch which often affects the volunteers and voluntary trainers, and a smooth transfer of knowledge within the organisation. A constant orientation, maintained through a systematic training strategy, can help to face the main challenges linked to the high turnover which characterises organisations based on voluntary work. For this reason – besides many courses and activities implemented by some of the partners involved in this project -, some projects about skill empowerment of volunteers have been designed so far, both in the framework of Grundtvig and of Erasmus+ cooperation projects.

This project aims to empower the skills of volunteers, to share best experience in a European dimension and to develop and disseminate tools and reusable resources to raise the quality of NGO-activities and of voluntary work.

The main project activities will therefore be six transnational project meetings, aimed at coordinating the project activities, at exchanging better practice on training (models, tools, methodological approaches, successful experience, lessons learned) and at collecting and creating proper training materials about the main topic of the project.

The participants in this project are volunteers within the NGO worldwide network the partner organisations are part of. This will ensure a wide dissemination scope and a high impact of the project results, giving an added value to this partnership.

After each project meeting the partners will run activities at national and local level. Collections of better practice, guidelines and other useful materials will be presented, discussed and adapted to the activities of each partner and disseminated within local and national networks, and the resources coming from the outcomes of the project will be available online even beyond the end of the project’s lifespan.

A remarkable portion of the time dedicated to the cooperation and communication among the organisations involved will be spent online, particularly in consideration of the current uncertain circumstances due to the COVID-19 pandemics, but also with the aim of consolidating digital communication and cooperation as a better practice for the organisations involved.

The expected intangible results of the project are identifiable in terms of increased awareness about the topics faced by the project in the participants, of empowerment not only of their skills and knowledge, but also of personal growth and personal development.

The envisaged impact of the partnership project is quantifiable in terms of a higher number and an improved effectiveness of non-formal learning activities of NGOs beyond the borders of the partnership in the participating countries as well as in other countries, thanks to the multiplier effect of the project.

In the long-term this will contribute to raise the quality of the activities carried out by volunteer-based organisations targeting youth, in particular when hosting young volunteers from abroad.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 59000 Eur

Project Coordinator

Centre Culturel Espéranto & Country: FR

Project Partners

• B.E.A. BUNTA ESPERANTO ASOCIO
• Kosmo Strategio ltd.
• Deutscher Esperanto-Bund e.V. – Filiale für Weiterbildung und Kultur
• WERELD ESPERANTO-JONGEREN ORGANISATIE VERENIGING MET BEPERKTE RECHTSBEVOEGDHEID
• Bialostockie Towarzystwo Esperantystow