What will the academic training of volunteer managers in Europe be like? This is the question that a European team of university professors and experts in volunteering, who met for a week in Lithuania, and among whom I was invited to attend as CEO & Founder of Volies and Voluntare, tried to answer.
The main objective of this working team has been to design different learning modules for a Higher Education for Volunteer Managers in the framework of the European Union.
Contents to approach volunteer management from different perspectives: from the individual, organisational, professional and also social level, offering a specialised and valid training in the different European countries.
Unos contenidos para abordar la gestión del voluntariado desde diferentes perspectivas: desde el nivel individual, organizativo, profesional y también social, que ofrezcan una formación especializada y válida en los distintos países europeos.
European Project Evis Demis
The meeting is part of the European project EVI-DEMS: Enhancing Volunteer Impact – Developing European Management Standards, in which several European universities, under the coordination of the University of Rotterdam and the Centre for European Volunteering, to which Volies belongs.
The main objective of this European project is to:
- To provide a framework to guide academic training for volunteer managers, increasing opportunities across Europe for current and future volunteer managers to receive recognised training based on common European standard
Better trained and qualified volunteer managers would, in turn, achieve a number of secondary objectives, for example:
- Ensuring that volunteering across Europe is managed effectively and ethically.
- Increasing the capacity of communities to prevent and recover from disasters.
- Increasing diversity and inclusion in the voluntary sector.
Challenges facing volunteering
In order to properly design these training programmes for volunteer managers, it is vital to keep in mind the main challenges facing volunteering in the coming years, among them:
- The need to connect with Generation Z, who are opting for other ways of showing their solidarity and being socially and environmentally active.
- Being able to manage volunteering from Diversity and Inclusion
- Make Volunteering “sexy” and sustainable.
- Measure the impact of volunteering compared to other forms of intervention.
- To achieve the valorisation of its professionalism.
In this project we have had the opportunity to see the richness of volunteering in Europe and how we can together enhance the value of this profession, which is so valuable in our societies.
The active participation of Volies and Voluntare in this project will allow us to focus the Voluntare Course for Volunteering Managers on future trends and challenges, as well as to contribute our knowledge from the Spanish experience to the European panorama.
