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Conscious Volunteering
Conscious Volunteering
Start date: Jul 1, 2014,
End date: Aug 31, 2015
PROJECT
FINISHED
The context of this project mainly came up from one of the main activiy of EUROACCIÓN, the social inclusion of disadvantaged young people (immigrants, young offenders, ethnic minorities etc.) as well as from the collaboration with other organizations which EUROACCION works with or has similar points of view like: social inclusion, the importance for young people of being aware of the situation of other people that don’t have the same opportunities and whose lifes situation represents a real risk of being excluded from the social system to which they belong.
This has been a long-term European Voluntary Service project (9 months) in which EUROACCION hosted two European volunteers. The main objectives of the project were:
1. To provide volunteers an environment to learn about themselves and about social inclusion, in the way that they could deepen the methodology in non-formal education developed by EUROACCION with social purpose.
2. To improve the offer of activities that exist in Murcia for young people with fewer opportunities through collaboration and the support provided by the European volunteers in organizing such activities.
3. To provide volunteers an intercultural experience in order to approch them to the local and cultural reality of the Murcia Region and never the less their own cultures.
4. To promote the Erasmus + Programme: YOUTH IN ACTION in highschools and to other youth groups and associations.
The activities of the project were:
At international level: logistic support for the training courses that EUROACCION carries out regularly. The themes of the training courses were based on personal growth, Human Rights Education and Intercultural Learning, Learning to learn, Coaching, personal or professional supervision and social inclusion.
At national and local level:
- Participation and collaboration: workshops with children and youngsters at risk of social exclusion, workshops of social inclusion with young offenders, English workshops for children and young immigrants with less opportunities, art therapy workshops, artistic expression to make them aware of their situation, social theater workshops.
- Helping to the maintainance the web site of EUROACCION.
- Spanish classes.
- Language exchanges of Spanish and English between European volunteers and young people that live in Murcia.
- Presentations of the ERASMUS + PROGRAMME: JUVENTUD EN ACCION in high schools in Murcia.
In all these activities, the methodology was based on non-formal education methods like: small working groups, discussions of positioning, exercises and group dynamics on various topics related to social inclusion and multiculturalism, role play exercises and simulations, energizers and social activities related with theater (or theater as the image of the invisible theater of Augusto Boal), lectures and multimedia presentations, individual exercises of reflection on self learning and activities for self- assessment skills, mentoring with the tutor and weekly mentoring with the project coordinator etc.
One benefit of this EVS project is the substantial improvement in the quality of work that our volunteers develop in their local communities and their sending organizations as well as in the tools that have been provided during the EVS project, because they are readily applicable to any activity that the volunteers want to perform after this project; our volunteers are trained to implement a lot of new activities for the benefit of other groups of disadvantaged youth in the local community from which they come.
The benefits of this project will result directly, first of all, in the European volunteers themselves, because they have been learning for 9 months new methods of working with a group of users quite different from what they were used and, on the other hand, in the people that the volunteers work with, directly or indirectly, in their daily work.