(European Volunteer Coordinators Vocation Education and Training) It is a European strategic partnership composed of seven organisations working with development projects for social inclusion and education from Austria, Finland, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia and Spain.
The project aims to have a positive impact on the training of volunteer coordinators by providing a standardised toolkit containing on-the-job training materials for skills and competencies commonly demanded by volunteer coordinators across Europe, not only for the management of development projects but also for the concrete education and training of the volunteers participating in them.
During the two-year project duration, partner organisations will exchange information and materials about their current on-the-job training practices with their professional volunteer coordinators, as well as conduct on-the-field research to identify the skills and competencies commonly demanded of volunteer coordinators across Europe. Partners will then use the collected information and materials to create a standardised toolkit containing on-the-job training materials for skills and competencies commonly demanded by volunteer coordinators in development organisations across Europe. This toolkit will be tested in the different partner countries to ensure its quality and improve it using real volunteer coordinators working in development organisations.
Moreover, the project will also facilitate transnational training mobilities, enabling volunteer coordinators from different partner organisations to participate in common education initiatives on volunteer management, which will be embedded within the project’s activities.
The creation of such standard pan-European training materials for professional volunteer coordinators will directly contribute to improving the transparency and recognition of their qualifications and competencies, utilising already established systems based on measurable recognitions (e.g., ECVET) at the transnational level, including those acquired through formal, non-formal, and informal learning.
Furthermore, the project will aim to identify the skills required by professional volunteer coordinators in development organisations, which will make it possible to compose a standard curriculum of competencies for this professional category that could be used afterwards for both vocational education and training centres (to develop new learning pathways, methodologies and degrees) and organisations working with projects for local and international development (to detect which competences should be reinforced on their teams and detect those skills needed for future recruitments).
According to all of this, EVOLVET is not only an innovative project whose main objective is to develop new materials and improve the situation of those professionals working as volunteer coordinators in the development field but also a necessary initiative to facilitate the transitions of those learning on social education and training centres offering NGOs coordination and management degrees, and the actual labour market that will wait for them after their graduation.
Besides all of this, the project also aims to create new links between organisations of different countries and sectors working on the same field (local and international development of communities) that could make it possible to reinforce the transnational structures of communication and sources to support projects on this field.
