The Strategic EVS is an action designed to mobilize young Europeans around a priority theme, such as welcoming, by increasing their skills and the impact on the communities the volunteers carry out the EVS experience in. WELCOME is one of the very few Strategic SVE projects approved and financed in Italy by the National Youth Agency. The official partners of EVS WELCOME are the Association Mimosa, Cooperativa Il Sestante, Cooperativa Equality, Group R of the Cooperative Polis, Association Khorakhanè, Cooperativa Orizzonti and Almaterra.
Specifically, Welcome provides for the incoming of 50 EVS volunteers in 3 years in the sector of the welcoming of refugees, 35 in long-term projects of 6 or 9 months, and 15 in a short-term project during one month, aimed at the organization of a festival for the international refugee day of 20 June 2020.
In addition to volunteer mobility, the project includes some complementary activities:
– 3 thematic workshops for volunteers, on welcome and integration, community journalism and intercultural learning. In these workshops the refugees themselves will play the role of trainers for many of the sessions will contributing with their skills, direct experience and their point of view.
-2 local actions “Go Deep”, a methodology developed by Xena with a strategic partnership with the specific purpose of promoting the integration of the various subjects present in the local community and at the same time discovering the talents and developing the personal skills of the participants.
-5 mobilities for operators of the associations involved who can do a one week job shadowing at another institution active in welcoming the refugees in Europe, in order to get to know new methodologies and activities that they can then bring back into their reality.