Are you working with volunteers? Do you support them in validating their competences acquired, or do you have an innovative idea?
If you answer positively to these questions, the VALLEY European Award is for you !
Find out more here.
We will invite the best three projects to the Award Ceremony that will take place in Marseille (France) on Thursday 16th February, 2017. The conference will give you the opportunity to present your project or idea to an international audience of experts, volunteering organisations, and relevant entities/personalities in the field.
The VALLEY team is preparing the 5-day training course that will take place in May 2016 in Timisoara, Romania.
The course addresses staff and trainers from partner and volunteering organisations working with young volunteers that are interested in providing recognition and evidence of learning outcomes in terms of personal and social competences gained through volunteering to their target groups.
The course aims at creating understanding of and know-how on validating competence developments in youth volunteering, assessing and documenting volunteers’ competences, and preparing a learning project within a volunteering activity.
On 18./19. November 2015 the partner consortium met for the second transnational meeting in Palermo. The meeting was dedicated to drawing conclusions from the previous research and stocktaking phase as basis for the development of the VALLEY validation approach for assessing and evidencing competence developments in volunteering activities.
From the gathered results can be derived that volunteering is considered an important learning field for young people, especially in the formal volunteering services like FSJ (Voluntary Social Year) or BFD (Federal Volunteering Service) that are organised as long term involvement of 6 up to 24 months and include compulsory training days (25 per year) on topics connected to the activities of the volunteering organisation or other competences considered relevant for the volunteers. By being engaged on long term basis young people develop numerous competences that help them become ready to take over responsibility and be “adult” members of society.
We can see strong parallels between organisers‘ and volunteers‘ answers when it comes to the question which competences are the most developed ones in volunteering.
Both groups also have very similar views on the importance of recognising and validating competences acquired in volunteering.
This means that there is a good potential to introduce tools and approaches for assessing and validating competences in volunteereing.
The project team has launched an online survey addressing both volunteering organisations and volunteers.
With the help of the surveys the team wants to get a deeper insight in the competences that can be acquired during volunteering services and if and how these are assessed and recognised.
Survey for volunteering organisers
Survey for (ex)volunteers
The kick-off meeting for the project VALLEY – Validation System in Lifelong Learning Experiences of Youth Volunteering – was held on 11th and 12th May 2015 in Göttingen, Germany.
During the kick-off meeting, the partnership came together to plan the implementation of the project and to share their experiences of volunteering and methodologies to support the recognition and validation of skills and competences of learners.
The partnership is made up of six partners from six different European countries which include BUPNET GmbH (Germany), the Association for the Promotion of Women in Romania (Romania), BEMIS (UK), CESIE (Italy), die Berater Unternehmensberatungs GmbH (Austria) and EUROCIRCLE (France).
Validation System in Lifelong Learning Experiences of Youth Volunteering
Are you working with volunteers? Do you support them in validating their competences acquired, or do you have an innovative idea?
