VolunTEAM 2.0

TC VolunTEAM2

Inclusive volunteering / Cooperation with volunteers in non-formal organizations

Key Action 1 Erasmus +: Mobility of Youth Workers – Training Course in France

Duration:

8 days (travel days included)

From 5th to 12th of July 2021

Location:

The training course will take place in a vacation centre, in a beautiful and quite mountainous area of France. The participants will be hosted in « La Matrassière » center in Saint Julien en Vercors, a little village in the Drôme department, located one hour away from Grenoble and 2 hours from Lyon.

The participants will sleep in big tents around the vacation center, every tent comporting a few beds. The tents are equipped with wood stoves in case of cold weather. The participants will share the public bathroom and toilets in the center right closed to the tents’ area.

Meals will be served in the center, in the dining room and prepared with bio-based products by a team of cooks. The group will have several rooms at their disposal for the training’s activities. The beautiful outdoor areas will also be used.

Keep in mind that the accommodation site is quite rural and isolated. Some excursions may be organized during the week to discover the beautiful surroundings (depending of the weather).

The website of the center is http://la-matrassiere.org

Participating countries:

France, Estonia, Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal

Participants: 15 participants: 2 or 3 participants from each participating country. Plus 2 french trainers from Concordia (experienced youth workers).

Groups of participants from each country should be gender balanced.

Target group: Young people from 18 years old working or cooperating with volunteers. Interested in developing their skills and knowledge in the area of inclusive volunteering and cooperation with volunteers in the organizations.

Good knowledge of English language would be useful to be able to actively participate to the training course.

Language: English

Background of the project:

Concordia is an organization of non-formal education, which promotes intercultural exchanges. Our traditional activity is the organisation of international workcamps, and one of its main goals is to allow participants to get open-minded and develop non-formal skills as autonomy and self-confidence, by meeting and living during a few weeks with people from all over the world with different cultural and social background and doing a voluntary work. We also involve a lot of long-term volunteers (service civic, ESC volunteers and ‘benevoles’) into the activity of our organization.

This Training Course comes from our wish to mix intercultural exchanges with the topics of cooperation with volunteers and inclusive volunteering.

Involving volunteers in our activities is an important part of our daily work. To make this involvement successful, we need to instore cooperation, to create a structure where the volunteers would be really considered, and would be fully part of the organisation. We need to provide a safe space so that all profiles of volunteers can find their place, including youngsters considered as with fewer opportunities for several reasons (social, economical, geographical obstacles, handicaps, refugees…).

We hope that the participants to the Training Course will be motivated to tackle these issues of inclusive volunteering and cooperation with volunteers with us, will be eager to share and discuss their experiences and points of view, and will be motivated to gain new skills in this sphere.

Themes and short presentation

Inclusive volunteering:

– How to welcome and support the volunteers into the organizations, and especially the volunteers with fewer opportunities;

– How to make team together with volunteers: values, tools and technics for an efficient cooperation;

– How to take collective decisions and organize in a democratic way inside the organizations

The course will explore wide range of questions concerning involving volunteers into the activities of the organization. We will explore such aspects of work with volunteers as how to welcome them, how to cooperate with them, how to give a specific place to everyone depending of the background, the profile and the personality, how to favour democracy in all aspects of the cooperation, how to deal with conflicts and how to take decisions all together.

We all want our volunteers to have a great experience and an important part of this is keeping them motivated. This course will help the participants to identify volunteers’ motivations and recognize their contribution in a way that’s right for them. Support goes beyond simply meeting volunteers regularly, it is about building a positive relationship with volunteers from the start and we will explore together how to enrich this correlation.

The training course is the opportunity for the participants to share different experiences related to these items. It will allow participants to talk about their experiences with volunteers, but also, thanks to peer-learning process, to exchange ideas and points of view between each other.

By the end of the project, the participants will create an overview of their learning outcomes of each day by putting together their guide of Top tips for inclusive volunteering and successful cooperation with volunteers comprising the most essential findings revealed during the project. This guide will serve as a useful tool for all the organisations that involve volunteers in their activities, to instore a real cooperation process inside their organizations.

As a result, the participants will acquire the skills and learn about the means that can be used for improving the quality of their work with volunteers.

Methodology:

The methodology (non-formal education, discussions and debates, simulation games, theoretical contributions) and the structure of the training course will encourage an active involvement of each participant in order to develop competences and new tools for personal and social development. Non-formal education tools will be used to create a friendly and caring atmosphere, considering each participant in his or her diversity, personality and culture, so that each person can feel free to express him(her)self, share his or her experiences, teach and learn from the others. Participants will be encouraged to be responsible for their learning process.

The methodology will include interactive activities that will allow to go deeper into the subject along with active involvement of each participant into the process of creating the top tips for successful involving volunteers comprising the most essential findings for cooperation with volunteers revealed during the project.

Financial conditions:

All the costs for food and accommodation as well as the program costs will be covered by the organizers.

The travel costs return to Saint Julien en Vercors will be covered within the following limits depending on the departure country (based on the European Union distance calculator):

– France – 20 or 180 euros (depending of the city of residence in France)

– Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy – 275 euros

– Estonia – 275 or 360 euros (depending of the city of residence in Estonia)

Concordia would like to encourage participants to buy travel tickets ASAP to enjoy economical prices. Please do not buy travel tickets until your participation has been approved by Concordia. All the travel costs will be reimbursed around 3 months after the end of the training course.

Please note that the process of reimbursement will be carried out directly with the applicant organizations and not with the individual participants.

We kindly remind all participants to keep the original tickets to be able to send them to us.


    Participation Form

    Please fill out the following form in order to apply for this training course

    Language Abilities (Spoken) *
    1. English
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