The aim of the project is to establish a school bank of volunteers through peer education. Young people from a disadvantage neighborhood will be the ambassadors of this project and will mobilise other young people and local entities to joint, with the mission of involving young people in voluntary activities in organisations that work on social rights access.

A story with only a year…

One year ago, a group of young people from a disadvantage neighborhood, commonly linked to risk behaviors, were challenged to participate on a three days residential training course about volunteering. On this training course, seventeen youths made their first contact with what is being a volunteer, what was their expectations about that, what were their rights and duties.

Once this training course is ended, youths were challenged to define a strategie that could keep the group together and keep their levels of motivation either to volunteering, either to the group itself. So, in order to do that, young people suggested that we should do a meeting twyce per month and regular volunteering work.

Since then, these regular meetings have several components: team building activities, non formal activities related to Human Rights education, sharing ideas and informations about new projects and some snacks at the end. During these meetings, young people start to be more aware of Human Rights as a whole, and have discussed more specific issues like discrimination, rights and duties, inequalities, poverty and social exclusion.

During the last year, young people get the opportunity to experiment several kinds of vollunteering (including the participation on an international work camp in july 2013) namely organization of an exhibition of local artists, recovery of a public space and the project space, heritage conservation, toy collection and delivery to children from a temporary foster care center, participation on cooking and delivering food to homeless people and other people in needs and also school support to childrens. So, since april 2013 have been performed 95 hours of vollunteering work, involving 30 youths.

In october 2013 took place the official launch of the ENTER! Project “Have you an hour to share?”, which was attended by several relevant entities at the local and national level in the youth field, volunteering and social inclusion, including the mayor, the president of the group of schools, the national director of Programa Escolhas, a representative from the national youth council and chairman of the national council for the promotion of volunteering. This event was prepared by young people and it was them that have made the presentation of the project and the logo that they choose to represent the project.

After this event, we connect with another local entity that wanted to start a project related to youth vollunteering and after some meetings with the participants, took place a mini-exchange of two days in december 2013.

Since then, young people keep in touch with each other and created a Facebook group. So, in april 2014, took place the second residential training course, participating 17 youths (6 of the them are in project since the very beginning and also have been trainers on this training course).

On the training course, that happens in Estoril during three days, the first day was dedicated to human rights education, using several activities from Compass and adapting some of them (for example, we create a game that we named “Who want’s to be Humanaire”, some kind of Party Game with a quizz, draws and forbidden words). We also did two different workshops, where the participants could choose in wich they want to participate: one related to discimination and the other about global citizenship.

On the second day we try to established and make clear the link between social/human rights and vollunteering work, doing some exercices where it became very clear the difference between needs and wants and where/in wich situations vollunteering work can be done. We also talk about the rigths and duties of vollunteers and entities that receive them. After that, “young trainers” were separated from the new participants and recorded some videos where they talk about their experiences on vollunteering, why they start doing it and why they keep doing it. At the same time, the other group were preparing some questions and challenges to the other youhs. After this separated moment, we presented the videos and did a kind of press conference.

On the third day, we proposed four kinds of vollunteering work, so that young people could choose what they would like to do. The proposals were: work on a social laundry, help on community gardens, beach cleanup and do some games with childrens from a foster care center.

In the middle of all these activities, specially by night, we prepared some team building and simply fun activities, all of them at the beach.

The evaluation of this activity have been quite positive, as we can see on the following pictures.

About the next steps, young people will be in the Local Youth Festival (8, 9 and 10 may 2014) and they will help on logistical issues and will also make a campaing agains violence distributing free hugs.

Videos from the project:

http://youtu.be/nWyz6aXy3cg

http://youtu.be/Z3j2MTPQnxU

http://youtu.be/b4C-oKJBWcs

http://youtu.be/lc5x-5gxlcQ