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 
training in Timisoara took place in May 2016. Partners and their associates came together to learn and exchange about the core topic of VALLEY: how to integrate young NEETs into volunteering and to offer proof of their competence developments by means of the LEVEL5 validation methodology.
The programme contained sessions on definitions and specifics of the target group, about multiple volunteering frameworks and settings in which partners work with volunteers, suitable assessment methods for competence developments and ways to apply LEVEL5 and the VALLEY platform for organisers and volunteers.
In the end all partners elaborated their piloting concepts and discussed related questions and feasible procedures to implement the VALLEY methodology in the second half of the project.
In the ve
ry same week of the training it was the National Volunteering Week in Romania. In this context we had the opportunity to visit Casa Faenza, a support and therapy center for autistic children, which so far is the first one of this kind in Romania.
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.
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.
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?
