Circus Central is a community circus and charity based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. We work with a range of delivery partners in the fields of youth work, cultural services, arts, education and health/wellbeing. Our regular activities include teaching circus skills to young people; creating artistic programmes for cultural institutions and organisations; developing artistic projects that engage local communities. We receive very little subsidised support to run our activities and currently survive off a mixture of commercial work and user-pays activities. We rely heavily on voluntary contributions of time and energy in develeoping and delivering our projects. The objective of this project is to host two EVS volunteers from Germany and Italy within our organisation in order to help develop capacity and continue with the community services that we provide. This volunteers will help us deliver our charitable objectives by shadowing professional and voluntary contributors to our programme. They will be assistant teachers on schools outreach visits; will become a participant mentors to the youth circus programme that we manage for young children; will shadow performance projects; provide personal assistance to the managing director; as well as other tasks and opportunities. Through their participation they will help develop the capacity within the organisation.The participant/sending organisations have been selected for the placement due to their background involvement in circus, their desire and enthusiasm to continue developing circus skills as a participant and tutor, and their passion for the development of young people through international placement exchange. By basing with our community circus they will be mentored to develop a greater understanding of the artforms involved, plus will get valuable lessons in teaching, leadership, business studies, entrepreneurism and arts administration.Over the course of the visit, they will develop their own capacity and skills in which to take on greater autonomy in these shadowing roles. They shall be integrated into the core of the organisation through fun, sociable activities that challenge them to step forward. Through weekly meetings and regular evaluation/reflection exercises, their development within our programme will be assessed, and future targets shall be set accordingly. Gradually they will be given roles that see them take a greater level of responsibility, but always with support and assistance provided.Our long term benefit of this project will be a greater capacity for some key staff members. This capacity will be directed towards moving the aims and objectives of our charity forward. We hope that having a full-time volunteer will show our local participants the value of volunteering on a European or local projects, and that they will see that a fulfilling life experience can be had through such a project. We hope that this will result in a greater appreciation for volunteering and a greater understanding of the importance that it can hold at a local level. We expect that an added outcome will be the understanding of how we as an organisation work better with volunteers, and how we can better integrate the energy and commitment of young people into our systems and idealogies.