Volunteering – as our organizations understand the term – is not just about going abroad to participate in a workcamp. For us, it’s an attitude to the world around us, a way to develop our citizenship engagement, sharing of common values and helping to create an open society. It’s a long-term issue, which enables making connections between the volunteer and the organization.
In this sense, we would like workcamp participants to consider taking part in further activities, such as campleading, trainings and maybe even a start-up program for supporting people in their own volunteering initiatives. The portfolio of such activities is listed in the toolbox, but there may be some other as well that other organizations all over the world may develop. By taking part in two, three or more of such activities, the participants often develop a closer relationship with their organization, some of them become members and it may happen that one day they ask for an internship or join the team of external trainers. And it’s not an exception among the employees that they are recruited from former volunteers, too.
This involvement of the people who participated in workcamps in the past can be conceived as a spiral, on which they ascend higher and higher, and gradually create a long-term involvement with the organization. We call it “educational spiral” because the process comprises a lot of learning. Within the educational spiral, the active and motivated volunteers reach specified roles somehow related to the functioning of the organization and become part of the NGO’s “world”. By doing this, they get a valuable know-how experience which they may use in their future (not only) working life.
Below, you can see a picture of the educational spiral.
Educational spiral