EVS Jyvaskyla
Start date: Jul 1, 2014,
End date: Aug 31, 2015
PROJECT
FINISHED
EVS Jyvaskyla was a project between Finland (hosting and coordinating organisation), Italy (sending organisation) and Germany (sending organisation). Project started 1st July 2014 and ended 31st August 2015. All activities were located between 1st August 2014 and 30th June 2015. There were two volunteer, one 21 year old female from Germany and 25 year old male from Italy (citizen of Macedonia).
Volunteers was in Finland get to know professional youth work. They worked as a colleague with permanent youth worker in youth centers, schools, multicultural center, events, trips and camps. Most of time they worked in youth centers, so called "open nights" which means young people can freely come to spend their free time with friends, play games or just hang out. In some days there are guided activities like cooking or hand crafting available, but they can choose if they want take part of those or not (volunteers were organizing those activities). In schools volunteers organize games to playtimes, themes or activity days, other events, discos and “grouping days. In multicultural center Gloria both volunteers studied Finnish one or two times per week and did their voluntary work. They also leaded a homework club and language groups and organize events. Volunteers get to know Youth council, Award program and other methods of youth work and styles to do it. They also did little project called Active YOUth inside this bigger EVS project, with cooperative AIESEC Jyväskylä organisation.
One and biggest goal of this project was to internationalize young people in Jyväskylä area. They got much information about it and their language skills became better. Youth workers are now braver to use their English skills as well and do international youth work. Volunteers were invited to professional school to tell about Erasmus+ program to students who study youth work and they also meet several youth workers (and other EVS volunteers) from Central Finland in meeting organize by Regional state Administrative Agency and share their experiences. There was also published an article about volunteers in Jyväskylä magazine, which is distributed in every household in Jyväskylä.
Communication with hosting and sending partners during this project was pretty low and this was weakness of this project. There was not any bigger problem so there was no urgent need to take contact to them. In future this is part we need to focus more, utilize more every partners experience and control everybody´s learning.
There were some cultural differences between South and North Europe and those differences caused some problems (like way to face people, work, equality). One surprise was slowness of Finnish bureaucracy. At times it felt volunteers do not have enough interested work tasks to do. However they had much more diversity in their work tasks than somebody else who has just started to work as a youth worker.
After this project cooperating will continue with some partners. There are plans to do new EVS project or Youth Exchange together.