participating ijgd. connecting people.

At the ijgd national office, we work together with the teams of the regional associations to organise international work camps in Germany and create opportunities for young people to take part in work camps outside Germany. In 2022, we will organise 51 camps here in Germany. Our target group is young people between the ages of 14 and 26. On the one hand, with the work camps we want to promote civic engagement among young people and support the charitable projects in the local community. Equally important to us is living and working together as an international group. The work camps - like all other ijgd projects - are based on our eight working principles: Ecological learning, voluntarism, self-organisation, social learning, intercultural learning, gender justice, anti-racism/anti-discrimination and political education.
Living in solidarity in an international group is one of the working principles on which ijgd's work is built. One pillar is political education and among them participation in democratic life is one of our core goals. We see ourselves as a place of political education. Political education here means experiencing and shaping an active democracy. The ijgd make people critical, encourage them to discuss and to
social structures and actively promote the self-determined formation of political will and awareness. The ijgd is convinced that volunteering as a special form of civic engagement cannot take place separately from living democracy and political education.
In concrete terms, this means that we work with very flat hierarchies in our work camps and in our office and motivate people to get involved with their own ideas and wishes. At the camps, this means that the group leaders accompany the young people in making their own decisions in the group. This also applies to the responsibility for the food budget or the organisation of meals or leisure time. At these points, we encourage the self-organising powers of the individual and the community.
In terms of content, many of our camps are oriented towards the values and content of the EU. A large number of projects take place in the field of environmental protection and in local communities, and inclusive and social work camps can also be found in our portfolio every year.
Our groups are diverse in terms of nationality, age and gender.
In the sense of education for sustainable development, discussions on the relationship between people and nature as well as on questions of ecology are encouraged across the generations in all areas of the ijgd and a heightened awareness of the environment is promoted. Possibilities of an ecological and sustainable everyday life are connected with positive experiences. Practical experiences encourage people to rethink their own patterns of action. In the process, it is shown how we ourselves can live sustainably and what far-reaching consequences our actions have for ourselves, for people and the environment all over the world, as well as for future generations.
Within the framework of the ESK, we are thus creating a project for young people who are interested in society, our values and meeting the community. Within the framework of the programme's principles, these building blocks correspond to the idea of solidarity. What is particularly fitting and worth emphasising here is that we want to welcome both the young people and the volunteers according to our working principle of self-organisation in order to give their topics and wishes a space to implement their ideas.
We are happy when the young people learn from and with us.