Provision of online and face-to-face training services to candidate volunteers of the European Voluntary Humanitarian Aid Corps

Humanitarian Aid Volunteering projects funded under this strand will offer the opportunity to young people aged 18 to 35 years old to participate in volunteering activities, aiming at supporting humanitarian aid operations. Such activities will provide them the opportunity to carry out tasks needed to support the actions undertaken by their host organizations.

This project, led by Lattanzio KIBS, in partnership with

Punto Sud, Bioforce, IECAH and IFHV, focuses on the steps that bring potential volunteers within the Humanitarian Aid Volunteering projects from registration on the EU Solidarity Corps Portal to placement in a pool of volunteers available for selection by organizations.

The volunteers must have successfully completed mandatory training aiming at preparing them for volunteering in third countries, so as to ensure that they have the necessary skills and competences to help people in need in the most effective way.

The training offered by this project cover the following competences:

• Transversal competences which are required in many sectors of volunteering and employment and are not specific to the humanitarian and development aid field (e.g. intercultural awareness or management of personal health and security);
• Specific competences which are required for humanitarian and development aid more widely (such as applying the humanitarian principles or the principles of development cooperation).

Young people (aged 18-35) interested in participating must register on the portal, and complete an initial questionnaire to explore their interest in taking part in volunteering program.

They will then take a self-assessment questionnaire to evaluate readiness to take part in this programme and to get an insight on what to expect from the experience.

Those truly motivated will move to the specific online training preparing candidates for volunteering in humanitarian and development aid. Once completed, they will have to pass an online test focusing on what they have learned to be able to have access in a 5-day face-to-face training. In case of force majeure, F2F trainings may be replaced by virtual classroom training modules. Upon successful completion of the face-to-face training (or the virtual training) the candidates will be placed in the pool of volunteers available for selection by organizations.

PuntoSud has been involved in the following activities:

• development of the contents of the self-assessment questionnaire
• development of part of the contents of the online training (covering 8 hours)
• development of online quiz to test the knowledge acquired from the online training
• delivery of face-to-face training to volunteers in Milan, Italy (at least 8 sessions per year)