EVS impact and problems
A study evaluates the impact of volunteering on the individual, the organizations and the local communities.
During my EVS experience I faced many issues everyday: dealing with my teammates and living peacefully with my housemates, trying to understand and transmit the information coming from the association or my workplace, the laws and the policies, finding the people I could talk to to understand all of this, et cetera. So just like anyone else in that situation, I had some ups and some downs during my stay. But when I went to the Mid Term Meeting, with volunteers from all over the country, I couldn't expect that for many other volunteers it was much worse: organizations were not caring about them at all, they were just receiving money from the Commission, giving them a house, and letting them do whatever they wanted for the whole day. This is the worst I've heard, but there were many middle-ways that were just a bit sad to me.
So after coming back, I started doing some researches about how the EVS works and its impact on people's lives. What I found was a study about the impact of the volunteering experience. So I'll put the most important things I found here, as well as my point of view on how the emerging situation could be solved.
The study was made by the European Commission itself, and gives a detailed evaluation of the impact of EVS on youngsters, organizations and local communities from 1996 to 2016. It examines a range of effects, from the volunteers' contribution, to the increasing working opportunities and the advantages for the society on different scales. The study was conducted through an online research with 8600 volunteers and 1900 organization representors participating.
From the data, the main reasons of participating to an EVS project from the volunteers were: the possibility to learn a different language (87%) and to meet new people (86%); the possibility to live abroad (84%); the development of soft skills (78%); the benefits for a career perspective (63%).
Main results on the individualMost of the volunteers think the EVS is very useful for the personal development, because it gives the opportunity to know the personal abilities, to develop one's competences, autonomy and independence.
Plus, EVS usually increases inter-personal and social competences and the understanding of other cultures, but it doesn't have much effect on technic competences.
It also helps to find a job: 83% say the experience helped them to see their future's opportunities, to clarify what they want to do in life and to prepare them for an international career. 1/10 of the ex-volunteers started their own company.
Finally, EVS has a concrete impact on the behaviours towards disadvantaged people and social issues.
Main results on the local communityEVS impact on local communities is usually seen as less significant than the one on the volunteers, mainly because of the lack of tools to measure it.
Volunteers' work is important especially for the communities which are harder to reach, such as Roma community, disabled people and people with learning deficit: EVS gives them the opportunity to experience new activities that wouldn't be available for them otherwise, to learn new languages and to become more open towards other cultures. For them, EVS volunteers can become role models.
Relating to the impact on the bigger community, EVS has a positive effect on the intercultural learning and dialogue through volunteers' integration with members of the local community.
There is the necessity of direct interactions between volunteers and citizens, for example through events organized outside the hosting organization. Without it, volunteers tend to stay together, while locals tend not to notice their presence or their work in the community.
There are clear advantages for the participating organizations: 97% consider their participation as successful. In terms of impact on the organizational development, the positive aspects are the openness to cultural diversity in the workers, the improving of the management competences and the international profile of the organizations.
ProblemsThe main problems regard the quality of some EVS projects:
- The projects' quality is not systematically monitored.
- The hosting organizations tend to have a lack of capacities to guarantee a high quality to the activities.
- The sending organizations don't have resources to give the right preparation before the start and the follow-up after the end of the project.
The National Agencies are already active in facing these weaknesses, but their role could be empowered.
Also, the new program “European Solidarity Corps” (ESC) from EU aims to address these issues, increasing the capacity of youth organisations and other organisations to provide meaningful experiences to even more young people. In order to reach the high standards that the European Commission has set for this initiative, young people and youth organisations must be involved in the implementation, co-management and monitoring of the ESC at national and EU level from the very beginning. The European Solidarity Corps is divided in two different strands, volunteering and occupational.
ESC main priorities are:
- clear definition of volunteering and occupational strands: volunteering must not be used as an excuse to replace real quality jobs with unpaid work.
- A clear definition of the solidarity sector and action: needed to make sure that the impact in each community and the society is measurable and effective
- Coordinated inter service approach in the European Commission: This approach should should contribute to develop better volunteering across EU Programmes and at making the initiatives more coherent.
...and many others
My suggestions to reinforce the impact of the EVS:
- Develop the consciousness of EVS advantages
- Strengthen the role of sending organizations in volunteers' selection
- Organize trainings for both sending and hosting organizations on the target in the selection of volunteers
- Increase the ability of the associations to offer a high quality experience to all volunteers
- Make sure the projects are conceived to satisfy local communities' needs
- Increase the controls on the projects from the National Agency
- Introduce tools for the volunteers to evaluate the work of the organization during his/her stay
The EVS experience should be always amazing like mine was. I really hope I'll never hear of anyone who had a bad one!
https://www.leargas.ie/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/EVS-impact-study-executive-2017-english.pdf
https://www.youthforum.org/sites/default/files/publication-pdfs/YFJ_Priorities_ESC.pdf
https://www.youthforum.org/topic/eu-solidarity-corps