EUROMENA: Developing Youth Volunteer Management for MENA and Europe

Volunteering is a vital tool for personal, professional and community development: by engaging in initiatives to advance the life in the community, young people work on their empathy, critical-thinking, solidarity and flexibility. Volunteering manifests solidarity, it promotes and facilitates social inclusion, builds social capital and transforms the society. Not only volunteering boosts civic engagement, even more it is crucial as it equips young people with some of the job skills of the future. In this regard, civil society organizations should develop programmes and initiatives to recognize, direct and maximize the potential of youth and to empower them to make an impact in their communities and thus transform the society. These efforts by the youth CSOs should be supported with in-depth analyzes of the community needs, developed volunteer management programmes for recruitment, training and mentoring of volunteers as well as introduced procedures for monitoring, evaluation and recognition of the volunteer’s skills and knowledge.Erasmus Plus programme has recognized the value of volunteers for active citizenship and solidarity, in particular through the European Solidarity Corps and European AID Volunteers. The President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker in 2017 announced the introduction of European Solidarity Corps, through which 100,000 young Europeans will get engaged by 2020. We are creating the EUROMENA: Developing youth volunteer management for MENA and Europe project, with an aim together with our partners (from MKD, SK, IT, HR, EG and LB) to work on enhancing the quality of volunteering and building organizational capacities for volunteer management of organizations in MENA and Europe. The idea behind the project and the partnership is to exchange know-how and positive practices of local and international volunteering, to develop organizational strategies for volunteering as well as to empower youth to take care of their communities and by boosting their sense of solidarity to bring positive changes in their societies.Led by this aim, we are proposing a mosaic of complementary capacity-building and mobility activities as well as innovative products: kick off meeting, study visits to discover the needs and potentials of volunteer management also in the MENA region, workshop on volunteer management for European and MENA youth organizations developing ,first of a kind volunteer management programme for Europe and MENA, local pilot workshops to prepare and upgrade the capacities of the NGOs to get certified for international volunteer programmes, innovative dissemination, including social media platform, quiz as a Facebook build app to empower youth on volunteering, handbook on quality volunteer management for MENA and Europe, as well as mini documentary summarizing volunteer and youth workers experiences. We hope to reach ca. 2,500 youth through the project and to inspire to make an impact in their community.