Image Mapping. A manual about volunteering in rural areas

Aims of the tool

- give guidance and ideas to volunteering organisations about how to have a bigger local impact with international volunteering projects
- share best practices of the organisations and youth workers involved in the creation of this manual
- fill a gap of missing literature on this topic

Description of the tool

What do we mean, when we say „volunteering in rural areas“? In the group that wrote this manual we have experience in international volunteering in rural areas, sending youth from rural areas to international volunteering and youth projects, working with local youth around heritage, human rights or peace – and many more. Youth from rural areas are, in our eyes and in the eyes of the Erasmus+ programme, also youth with fewer opportunities, with less access and infrastructure provided for being involved in international projects.

International volunteering can have a big impact. We want our international youth projects to have positive effects to their immediate surroundings, to counter stereotypes, to reach target groups we usually don’t reach with peace projects, to contribute to a positive and sustainable rural development and to give youth access to a more diverse image of what the place they are visiting or living in is like.

There is not much literature about this topic out there that is accessible to us as youth workers. When we organize international youth projects and volunteering camps in the countryside, it can sometimes feel like a parallel universe: Youth from all around Europe engage in an intense intercultural exchange, sometimes with a lot of interaction with the local community and sometimes very little. We want to strengthen the local impact of international volunteering projects and we want to discuss how to make it better. We lack forums of interaction with other youth workers and we understand this manual as an invitation to a bigger discussion around this topic.

This is the outcome of a seminar from March 2020. The seminar was a space for reflection around our practice and experiences with volunteering in rural areas, it took place in the village Kötschach-Mauthen in the South of Austria. We exchanged non-formal education methods and action forms that we use in our youth work in the countryside. We discussed how to create intercultural events in rural areas and youth projects around local heritage. And we talked about the possibilities that Erasmus+ gives us for projects in our local contexts. While a really fun and interesting experience, the end of the seminar was the beginning of the lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with all the challenges involved in this.