Volunteering Management Expedition (VolExpo)

All around Europe, both at a national level and in European projects, education and volunteering professionals design every year an array of highly useful tools and methods for volunteer management. However, many of them are underused despite heavy dissemination efforts. At the same time, European volunteer managers and coordinators lack opportunities for professional development, as the Erasmus+ project FUTUR3 has discovered (see Benchmarking Report).

The Volunteer Management Expedition (VolExpo) project aims to improve the methodological competences of volunteer managers and coordinators (both paid and unpaid) by collecting and methods and tools that correspond to their skills needs from at least 10 European countries, sharing them at virtual ‘expeditions’. i.e. e-learning projects with webinars, web clinics and online discussions, testing them for impact in partners’ countries with volunteers and selecting the most useful ones for translation and localisation. On its completion, it will publish an interactive toolbox for volunteer managers to gain new tools for their work.

The objectives of the VolExpo project are

• • To increase the managerial and supervision competences of European volunteer managers and coordinators on issues on which they have expressed future skills needs (4 skills groups: 1. managerial – project skills, time management etc.; 2. supervision – leadership coordinating people, conflict resolution etc.); 3. communication (including social media and ITs for volunteer management); 4. cooperation (with volunteers, colleagues, other organisations, media etc.).
  • To improve the volunteering experience and increase opportunities for learning among volunteers across Europe through their managers’ increased competences.
  • To make better use of existing tools and methods for volunteer management by selecting suitable ones for presentations and virtual workshops and translating and localissing the ones most suitable for use in partners’ countries.
  • In addition, the project aims to strengthen networks between European volunteer managers locally through its testing activities and internationally through its virtual mobility activities or ‘expeditions’ as they are called in this project (webinars, web clinics).

The project aims to achieve the following impacts

• • Individual volunteer managers will gain knowledge about various European tools and methods for volunteer management and a growing competence in using them. Their competences will also grow  through networking both locally and internationally.
  • Volunteers will experience an improved volunteering experience, leading to an increased capacity to act in their volunteering tasks and new learning opportunities.
  • Participating organisations should observe an increased capacity to supervise and manage their volunteers, an increased understanding of current methods in the field and an increased capacity to train their stakeholders.
  • Other stakeholders (voluntary sector organisations ad their umbrella organisations around Europe) will have access to new knowledge about methods and tools available for volunteer management and their transferability, and increase their capacity for management and training in the field.

Duration of the project: 24 months (1st September, 2019 – 31st August, 2021)