Volcar

Volunteering is a rich learning environment, where motivated people of all ages contribute to civil society in a self chosen position and environment, and at the same time gain skills and competences that have value for their personal and professional development and career. In this way, volunteering offers a nice mixture of non-formal and informal learning.

This project was based on the results of the Public Consultation ''Towards a European Area of Skills and Qualifications'', published by the European Commission on 17 June 2014. The report of this consultation states that there should be more focus on the individual and on the end users of validation tools, that there should be more attention for guidance, and that the EQF should be more open towards nonformal and informal learning.

Translated to the world of volunteering, this means that

- there should be more attention for guidance of volunteers in their personal and professional development (in stead of developing more tools and methods for recognition and validation of their learning outcomes)

- the starting point of the validation process should be the individual, not the system

- we should build bridges between the outcomes of informal and nonformal learning processes on one side and the European Qualifications Framework on the other side.

The project was innovative in 3 ways:

- it builded bridges between informal learning on one side and the European Qualifications Framework on the other side

- it created a clear link between volunteering on one side and professional career guidance on the other side

- it did not provide new tools or methods, but providesd guidance for volunteers in using these tools and methods for their personal and professional development.

The project results are:

- Booklet (PDF/printed) for volunteers how to ‘’translate’’ their volunteer qualifications to the labour market.

- Online training (using the online learning platform PBlearn or a similar platform) to support the use of the booklet.

- Face to face training in addition to the online training, custom made for volunteering organisations, to be offered in the framework of Erasmus+ Key Action 1.

Partners

In this project we worked together with the BONSAI, local volunteer centre of Dubrovnik (Croatia) and European Volunteer Centre (Belgium).

This project is funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union.