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Impact

The project is expected to have both short-term and longer-term impacts on a range of key actors involved in youth associations, schools and any educative bodies, local authorities, both in participating countries and Europe-wide.

Jucivol will contribute to:

  1. Raising consciousness among the general public, policy makers, and employment actors.
  2. Identification and evaluation of existing activities of various actors (informal education programmes, youth associations, etc.), including potential employers. The interactions in themselves are designed to increase and promote volunteering & citizenship awareness and contribute to long-term, and broader-scale engagement in citizen-friendly behaviour and attitudes.
  3. Identification and evaluation of pedagogical approaches for young people, aged 15-30 years old, involved in various official and unofficial education programmes, dedicated to democratic values, fundamental rights, intercultural understanding and active citizenship themes. Analysis of their cooperation with mentors, as well as their perceived and actual benefits in terms of improvements of their career chances, will provide us an insight into methods and optimal approaches for motivating young people.
  4. Designing concrete yet flexible solutions for tutoring/mentoring to support professionals working with young people (indirect public of the JuCiVol) by designing guidelines, protocols and on-the-ground training sessions, aiming at helping them to overcome challenges and obstacles to encourage volunteering, inspire voluntary activities and support entrepreneurship.
  5. Supporting education and training of young people in order for them to take the lead in voluntary activities, and jointly transform their ideas, where possible, into actions that can facilitate longer-term funding and success. Building on the principles of co-design and co-production, we will thus demonstrate the longer term legacy in terms of both data collected by volunteers, and generating incomes, jobs, or other benefits to the career of participants in voluntary activities.
  6. Creating a national and culturally adapted set of methodologies for encouraging young people living in sensitive areas and/or sharing a migrant background to volunteer.
  7. Improving the reputation of participating volunteers, to allow young people to exploit their engagement for gaining work experience and increase their chances for employment or further education.
  8. Identification of possibilities to engage other young people to get involved in voluntary activities and monitoring beyond the project span (e.g. through crowd-funding).
  9. Expanding the range of volunteers who, beyond participating in (short term) voluntary activities, will collect longer-term data, generate new forms of active citizenship, adhere to democratic values, fundamental rights, intercultural understanding knowledge –thus promoting to the rapid expansion of volunteering in Europe and its usage to promote the EU’s sustainability goals.
  10. A low level of basic skills in vocational schools produces serious constraints to obtain competitive knowledge in life-long learning process. There is a need to improve not only the sense of initiative but also a development in the areas of other key competences. With higher sense of initiative and engagement more young people will start their own volunteer projects related to citizenship and Volunteering.
  11. Volunteering will be, therefore, beneficial to acquire key competences for personal, professional and social development for youngsters living in sensitive areas and/or sharing a migrant background.
  12. Teachers and educators working with these youngsters will be better equipped to propose alternative educative learning process with a relevant pedagogical strategy to answer the many questions raised by youngsters and to enhance solidarity and democratic values in order to struggle against a negative feeling – such as loneliness and exclusion.

 

Local impact

The experimentation of the mentoring among professionals (teachers & educators) & training among youngsters will be organised in cooperation with associations and educative bodies with a volunteer background, helping them in the dissemination, recruitment and capacity building of volunteering. Most of these organizations operate on a local level.

Regional impact

Lessons learnt on the local ground will be shared and disseminated to various networks and organisations, official and unofficial education programmes or through different channels (websites, weblogs, Facebook, etc.) offering knowledge and tools to promote volunteering among young people at the regional level.

National impact

Slovenia

The project will influence a perception of volunteering and will present it as an opportunity to get employment. The approach will be disseminated throughout international networks, which have their branches in Slovenia, e.g. Let’s Do It – World Cleanup, among others.

France

Youngsters will benefit from special “employments” or status (interns, civic service). Some public institutions are very focused on youngsters facing many difficulties (social, economic, educative…). The idea to develop a transversal training addressing various profiles of youngsters on the basis of their voluntary involvement may change the perspective. Some previous projects conducted on the ground have already enhanced Volunteering among youngsters as a way to gain an experience and to develop competences for an educative path or a professional future.

Italy

EriFo cooperates with a broad range of organizations who either train and educate volunteers. Better understanding of engagement motivations will improve the approaches and tools to use and offer other organizations; and those tools, in return, will generate added benefits at much larger extents than those generated by professionals (i.e., citizen-based).

Cyprus

The work with current and potential leaders will help youngsters to qualify for related jobs, help capacity building within voluntary organizations, and expand the cooperation network, and extent of engagement and data collection among citizens – thus promoting citizenship and Volunteering for all in Cyprus. Volunteers are usually young people, mainly students, without employment experiences. Voluntary activity is therefore often their first opportunity to gain some work experiences and can be the first step in one’s career. Considering the high unemployment rate among youngsters volunteering may significantly improve their chances to gain professional skills.

Spain

More than 1.4 million young people aged between 18 and 30 are unemployed. More than half of them have not found their first job for over a year; barely 20% of young people are engaged in voluntary activities. Several campaigns have encouraged young people to become entrepreneurs but none of them aims to communicate with young people through non-formal education, values of solidarity commitment, and actions on the ground. The project will serve to transmit values of solidarity and share information about voluntary actions among young people. Moreover, showing them the benefits of volunteering will give these youngsters the opportunity to put into practice competences they already have and develop new ones.

International / European impact

Local, regional and national organisations, networks and institutions are commonly connected with other similar organisations in the same country and abroad and form supranational networks. The guidelines and recommendations are anticipated to be highly applicable across Europe, especially through identifying and communicating the immediate and longer-term benefits from volunteering and participation. Finally, if proven successful, the translation of new knowledge into real capacity-building activities among volunteer-participants may offer a demonstrative kick-starter to new activities and initiatives, promoting job creation for youngsters across Europe.
Offering youngsters living in sensitive areas and suffering from social and economic exclusion an opportunity to get in contact with these networks is also a way to struggle against discrimination and to promote democratic values and spread the word on fundamental rights and active citizenship.

 

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