EUROPEAN SOLIDARITY VOICES 2019
Last year we wrapped up our Volunteering Partnership project “European Solidarity Voices – 2019”, and we’re happy to share its results!
“European Solidarity Voices” is a triennial volunteering partnership project, coordinated by Associazione Kora and funded by the European Commission through the Italian National Youth Agency, thanks to the European Solidarity Corps programme. It involves more than 200 volunteers in 3 years, and its main objective is to spread awareness on the importance of volunteering and solidarity.
The first annuality of the project, 2018, has been summarised in this video: check it out below or download it here!
The main issue that this project is addressing is the low consideration of volunteering by European youth, due to different factors: the job market has never been more unpredictable, young people don’t know where to find trustworthy and supported volunteering opportunities, and they consider volunteering as something not useful for their education or employability.
When youngsters have a low consideration of volunteering, they do not take part in volunteering projects, and this leads to close mindedness and individualism, passive citizenship, missed educational opportunities, which result in a lack of solidarity, weaker democracy, and lower employability.
Therefore, “European Solidarity Voices” aims at making youth aware of the educational benefits coming from volunteering, that include soft skills such as adaptability, learning to learn, open mindedness and self-awareness, but also professional skills such as team work, foreign languages and work-related skills.
For the 2019 annuality we had to face many challenges, most of them related to the Covid-19 pandemic outburst: this kept several activities stuck for a while, forced us to rearrange some or most of the volunteers’ tasks, and made Kora finally move back from our office in the region’s capital to our beloved Buona Terra school farm in the countryside.
In the end, the 2019 annuality involved 23 NGOs and 79 volunteers from 16 countries, who took part in different activities in Italy and Portugal, hosted by diverse organisations. If we consider an average impact of each volunteer on 20 people, the project reached at least 1.580 people all over Europe!
The project also did this by giving voice to the volunteers themselves, making them protagonists of their own projects and allowing them to communicate to other youngsters what they were actually experiencing, learning, bringing home. This is why we decided to summarise all the different activities of this project in a booklet with the volunteers’ own words and stunning pictures of their activities. Find it below or download it here!
