We are four European organizations like you, striving to bring quality in volunteering in Europe and in our communities. With the Erasmus Plus project “EVS Realm: Masters of the Learning Path” we aimed to increase the quality of the European Solidarity Corps (ESC) programme, especially its mentoring dimension, by creating valuable and adapted working tools for mentors, as well as training frameworks for mentors and for ESC project coordinators regarding ESC project implementation.
We would like to share with you the results and tools we created during our 30-month long project. We have worked hard on these resources, we consider they can be treasures in the field and we hope you will take the time to discover them and use them in your work, if they respond to your implementation needs. So read along – we hope you reach the end of the email, as travelling in any Realm is not something to do in a haste
1. EVS Strong Houses Mastery Class – a Training design for beginner ESC hosting organizations – focused on organisational management in relation to quality ESC project design, with the purpose of generating meaningful learning experiences for all those involved (volunteers, organizations, community);
2. Mentors’ Initiation Journey Itinerary – a Training design for ESC mentors (current or future) or other support-persons – focused on generating understanding of the mentoring role and defining an individualised mentoring process for each volunteer and the overall support-role to be offered within an ESC volunteering project;
3. TreasureBox for Mentors and other support-persons in ESC Volunteering projects – a set of 26 working tools and mentoring techniques for ESC mentors and other support-persons, structured in 4 support-categories (Building relationships within the project team; Personal, emotional and mental wellbeing; Problem Solving; Personal Development and the Learning Process) for different mentoring needs and phases in a mentoring relationship;
4. Policy Paper – Recommendations on Improved ESC Quality – policy proposals for the improvement of the mentoring dimension in transnational volunteering program ESC, based on evidence gathered throughout the project.
These resources were developed with the support, participation and engagement of several different actors involved in the European volunteering environment (sending, hosting, coordinating organisations, NAs, volunteers, mentors and EU institutions), so maybe some of you were included in the consultation process. We hope that they will prove to be valuable instruments in the progress of the implementation of the ESC and especially for the role of mentors, which all stakeholdes have recognized as extremely important and also many times instrumental to the overall succes of volunteering projects.
All resources are in English, but for the Policy Recommendations you can also find here shortened versions in French, Flemish, Greek, Polish and Romanian.
To give you a teaser, if you are more of a visual person – you can discover the 3rd resource presented above – the magic TreasureBox – in this VIDEO. We are most proud of this toolbox which we called TreasureBox, which came as an answer to many calls in the field and from mentors all over Europe, in need of concrete tools, activities and methods. If you end up using even just one of the 26 tools, we would be happy to know!
We hope you will make use of these materials in the implementation of your daily activities and we would be really glad if you would like to establish contact with us.
There are several ways:
A.reply to this email – realmofvol@gmail.com – and save it in your address book, as it is an email which will continue to be used for European volunteering-related communication. The Volunteering Realm is there, even after the project closure and we plan to have more troops entering it
B. connect to the project Facebook page – https://www.facebook.com/evsrealm/, where we will continue to post news, updates and opportunities related to ESC and Volunteering in Europe. We, the EVS Realm partners, are keen promoters and implementers of the programe, so we are not going anywhere. Neither is the Volunteering movement in Europe, which we predict will increase visibility and strenght. So join our forces!
C. join the Masters in the Volunteering Realm community – created during the project with those who were trained in the Realm and decided never to leave it. You can become a Master as well and have access to a group of practitioners like you – with whom you can share dillemmas, best practices, questions, concerns and tools, all focused on mentoring and volunteering project implementations. The community is this: https://www.facebook.com/groups/345689205869889/
The project partners were: Pro Vobis – National Resource Center for Volunteering – Romania (www.provobis.ro) in partnership with Politistiko Ergastiri Ayion Omoloyiton – Cyprus (www.politistiko-ergastiri.org), Stowarzyszenie ANAWOJ – Poland (www.anawoj.org) and the European Volunteer Centre – Belgium (www.europeanvolunteercentre.org). The project was implemented from March 1st 2017 until August 31th 2019, and funded by the European Union within the Erasmus+ Program, Youth Strategic Partnerships, under the contract number: 2016-3-RO01-KA205-035560
We wish you a very nice day and we are here for any further details, questions, feedback and … why not? … partnership proposals!
Come! Enter the Realm!
EVS Realm project team