On 18./19. November 2015 the VALLEY partners 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.
One element of the research phase was an online survey that was completed by more than 220 people.
Benefits of volunteering
From the gathered results can be derived that volunteering is considered as 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.
The benefits at a glance (for a better legibility, please click on the graph):
By being engaged on long term basis young people develop numerous competences that help them become ready for responsibility and to 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.
For the volunteers: For the organisers:
Both groups also have very similar views on the importance of recognising and validating competences acquired in volunteering:
For the volunteers: For the organisers:
This means that there is a good potential to introduce tools and approaches for assessing and validating competences in volunteereing. The VALLEY team will work on a meaningful validation approach of competence developments in the following months.
