“Volunteering – from passion to impact”

The benefits of volunteering are enormous to an individual volunteer, their family and community. Aside from helping with college applications and resumes, volunteering can also have a life-changing effect on their personal life. One fantastic thing that volunteering can offer is a new understanding of volunteers’ own abilities. Whether they are planning a huge event or making flyers for a small gathering, every task can help them understand how to accomplish something new. Volunteers can learn important skills like how to plan a budget or how to supervise and manage. Or, they can take time to enhance skills they already have by spending more time actively using them. An added side effect of volunteering is that it gives volunteers an opportunity to try out possible careers and opportunities, depending in which department they volunteer: fundraising, PR, project management, youth clubs, event management, etc. 

This training course is focused on basics of volunteering and understanding on how to develop and manage programs for volunteering. Participants will develop their understanding and knowledge on volunteering and existing volunteering opportunities in their local communities and as part of Erasmus+ programme and ESC. Furthermore, they will develop knowledge and skills for developing volunteering activities based on the real needs of the local communities, will learn how to recruit, educate and support volunteers; and how to evaluate and further improve programs and activities for volunteers.

Requirements for possible applicants:

It's required that participants are part of local organisations, which will be used as case studies throughout the program of the event; for development of practical plans of volunteering activities and/or programs that can be implemented on level of participants’ organisations.

As part of preparatory activities, participants will be obliged to finish online learning course and do preparatory research/analysis of country realities.

Objectives

• To raise understanding and knowledge of participants on volunteering in their local communities, existing volunteering opportunities and legislations.
• To develop knowledge and skills of participants in fields of: volunteering and principles of volunteering, motivation of volunteers, rights and responsibilities of volunteers and organisations.
• To raise level of knowledge and skills of participants on developing local level volunteering activities within their organisations and their local communities, based on: the needs analysis, strategies for recruiting, educating and supporting volunteers, supporting and providing supervision to volunteers, and evaluating volunteering programs.
• To provide opportunity and support for participants to develop new local and international projects and initiatives for volunteering of youngsters and other youth workers from their organisations.
• To develop and further improve knowledge of participants about Erasmus+ program and ESC, as well as about the Youthpass and recognition of learning through models of key competences. 

Pre-training course tasks for participants / preparation for the training course: 

To present the main activities and projects of their organization, and also to share some examples of good practice.

To go through preparatory online course, including practical assignment of preparatory research/analysis of country realities