Stay Tuned!

<< Background >>One of the most important types of community involvement is volunteering, which can provide both physical and mental health benefits for volunteers as well as numerous positive outcomes for the community. It impacts everyone involved and is a rewarding concept with many benefits. Moreover, volunteerism is crucial for certain organisations because they may depend heavily on volunteer work in order to function. Furthermore, some organisations do not have the money to pay the salaries of every employee since they, for example, receive a portion of their funding from the local or federal governments. In this way, these organisations depend on volunteer work in order to function. The organisation is then capable of remaining operational, while the volunteers are able to help those in need. We felt the need to support volunteering in the local communities of all international partners and make research to discovert good practices used in the field of volunteering of young people across the countries and to share them to motivate more young people to join volunteering and to make them motivated to stay active in volunteering. Our needs were to find out methods and strategies used in the field of volunteering of young people and share it.<< Objectives >>The general objective was building capacity of organisations to determine ways of motivating young volunteers to continue contributing to the common good.The concrete objectives of this project were:- Analysis of organisations’ image and volunteers’ motivation for the development of the Guide of Good Practices. The Guide’s goal is to help organisations with attracting and retaining volunteers.- Sharing and refining the Guide during a seminar for volunteer-oriented organisations prior to the national and international testing of best practices.- Sharing of Guide and other findings with volunteer-reliant organisations.The main outcomes of the project will be:- Elaboration of the Guide: guide of good practices that will be completed after activities and will equip organisations for their quest of recruiting more volunteers and promote the concept of volunteering in general.- Capacity Building: throughout the research phase as well as its results, the participating organisations will build their capacity in the field of volunteerism promotion and volunteer recruitment.<< Implementation >>All the activities were connected one to another and also were all organized to have successful implementation of the project. There were online meetings with the partner organizations representatives to plan the start of the project the run of the project and the whole process. There was meeting of the partner organization representatives in the Czech Republic to make clear the working steps, after that each partner started to work on their tasks in management, reports, research, graphics etc. There was development of the research form, later collecting data for the research in all the countries, then evaluation and making summary from the research, creating the guide, seminar to share the guide with all the information and the good practices and the plan the local activities to spread the new information and motivate for volunteering by the local activities, organizing conferences about volunteering in all the countries, then organizing the local activities and sharing and spreading the guide, final meeting in Italy of all the partner organizations representatives and evaluation of the whole project.All these activities were part of the implementation. The local activities had concrete shape to follow by all partners. << Results >>Successful project implementation had result in the development of the guide, meaningful seminar, reports, and final implementation. The Transnational Project Meeting allowed the consortium to evaluate the findings and set the foundation for the methodology, plan the development of the guide and the seminar. The 3 official Virtual Project Meetings monitored and supported progress, discussed research findings, determined the scope of the project, reviewed final guide revisions, and assessed guide implementation. The final meeting discussed the continuation of the project and evaluated results.Here is the summary:Online meetings.Meetings of partner organiziations representatives in Czech Republic and Italy.Seminar in Spain with many outcomes and useful information and also spreading the information about the project in local organizations and participating in local volunteering event.Conferences in every country.All participants of seminar shared their experience with other people, their organization or other target group.All partner organizations had to share guide on various platforms where it can be useful - NGOs from the youth field, youth work, volunteering field, community work, associations gathering NGOs and others.