Upcoming projects for 2018

1. KA3 Volunteering
#IVS4Peace, Inclusive Voluntary Service 4 Peace

CCIVS has been awarded funding by the KA3 Erasmus+ programme of the European Commission for an important project, “#IVS4Peace, Inclusive Voluntary Service 4 Peace” which aims to support the social inclusion process of 180 young people with fewer opportunities, migrants and refugees in volunteer projects.

#IVS4Peace intends to map the current best practices, tools and working methods focusing on social inclusion from the International Voluntary Service movement, to compile, select, improve and test them and finally to create a set of tools for social inclusion which can be freely disseminated.

Joining CCIVS for the three year project, our sister network the Alliance of European Voluntary Service organisations, the network Youth of European Nationalities and member organisations of CCIVS and Alliance: Egyesek Hungary, Solidarités Jeunesses France, Elix Greece and CBB Belgium. Over 200 IVS organisations will support the process by ‘testing the tools’ during the final stages.

The tool will be developed through specific management and development meetings and laboratories, and will be applied to voluntary workcamps. Through 3 rounds of workcamps, 180 members of the target group will be involved in voluntary activities, locally and abroad, organised by 4 partners in France, Greece, Hungary and Belgium. The impact of these experiences will be measured using our existing tools and with the accompaniment of an expert for this process.

To finalise the project a series of networking events will take place in different countries in order to share and exchange information with youth and social workers from outside of the IVS sector.
A Final Conference will promote the overall project and its results, the Conference will be the means to address the policy recommendations result of the project to European Union institutions, the Erasmus+ Agencies, the European Youth Foundation, to local governments and other institutional partners.

The final products of the project will include online courses addressed to educators, a website and an application to promote the initiative, toolkits and instruments for youth workers.

2. IVS for Climate Justice

IVS for Climate Justice is a worldwide programme taking place in over 100 countries, bringing together the activities of four International Voluntary Service networks, CCIVS, Service Civil international (SCI), Alliance of European Voluntary Service organisations and Network for Voluntary Development Asia (NVDA). It engages volunteers with local communities to work on grassroots projects that combine manual work and awareness raising actions. These address issues such as: climate change, carbon offset, environmental sustainability, protection of ecosystems, water and soil management and conservation.

Some Data:

• 3000 short term projects and 30.000 volunteers – 38.6% of these are environmental projects
• 3000000 hours of volunteer work
• 70+ million USD worth of volunteering time
• 200 organisations
• 100 countries (in all UNESCO regions)

The project’s partners include: The Council of Europe – European Youth Foundation, Erasmus+ programme of the European Union, The Technical University of Santa Fe Argentina (Earth construction training), The University of Illinois USA (Impact measurement)
The project is featured on the UNESCO Green Citizens platform

In 2018 and 19 CCIVS will develop a two-year project supported by the KA2 Erasmus+ programme of the European Commission, focusing on the above theme which will bring together the non-formal IVS sector and the Technical University of Santa Fe, Argentina to provide two trainings in Sustainable Food Production and Bioconstruction techniques. It includes a formal follow up process (online and offline) to 33 IVS organisations from 28 countries in 5 regions of the world who work in and with local communities.

The project seeks to actively integrate local communitiesinthe follow up actions in each of the 28 countries, which aim to revalorisetraditional andalternative techniques; it willalso raise awareness about the negative effects of unsustainable food production and housing and how these contributeto Climate Change.
IVS for Climate Justicewill use monitoring and impact measurement tools to follow the process implemented by external experts from the University of Illinois.

The different events foreseen are:

• Kick off Conference and Forum “Just Volunteers: The Transformational Power of International Voluntary Actions for Climate Justice and Freedom of Movement” taking place in UNESCO, Paris;
• Workshops on Bioconstruction (Ecuador) and Sustainable Food Production (India);
• Follow up actions in and with local communities in 28 countries;
• Follow-up system; online and offline learning;
• Impact measurement.