There is no doubt that volunteering and active involvement in everyday life of the immediate community of everyone of us is immensely important. They belong to a crucial set of skills that a European citizen needs to do well in life and to be a good, active and responsible citizen, who is able to take initiatiative and actually make a difference. This project introduces an innovative approach for students to achieve understanding of the concept of community within civil society. Usually, there are no volunteering programmes at this stage of education in participating schools' curricula. With this project we would like to bring volunteering into school involving both pupils and teachers/significant others. We aim to raise awareness of volunteering in local communities of the participants. In some countries, especially in Western Europe, volunteering is becoming an inseparable part of secondary school education.We believe that every secondary school student should complete some kind of volunteering programme before graduation, which is why we aimed to introduce and put this topic forward within the "KA2" and not, for instance, within the "Youth" Erasmus programme.The ambition of this project is, in the first place, to carry out a pilot project consisting of a 30 hour voluntary work programme for students. When properly finished (including case studies and feedback) this "package" will be presented to the relevant educational authorities proposing this to become a part of standard curricula.A secondary project activity is enhancing parent/significant others' involvement in school life. This will be done by means of sharing examples of good practice and organising extra curricular activities of various kinds (charitable, sporting, educational, entertainment). This will improve mutual understanding, parental support of the school and pupils and also fun, which is necessary for a complex and balanced way of education of today´s students.
There is no doubt that volunteering and active involvement in everyday life of the immediate community of everyone of us is immensely important, helping develop the sense of responsibility and a set of social and interpersonal skills that can hardly ever be taught or studied at school.This project introduced an innovative approach for students to achieve understanding of the concept of community within civil society. Traditionally, volunteering programmes have not been part of secondary schools´ curricula across Europe. With this project we brought volunteering into schools, involving both pupils and teachers/significant others. Also we aimed to raise awareness of volunteering in local communities of the participants. We believe that every secondary school student should complete some kind of volunteering programme before graduation, which is why we aimed to introduce and put this topic forward within the "KA2" and not, for instance, within the "Youth" Erasmus programme. In this project students carried out a programme consisting of a 30 hour voluntary work of their choice. This voluntary work was primarily supposed to be done after school, in students´ free time. (with exceptions ensuing from the nature of the activity). At the end this "package" was presented to the relevant educational authorities proposing this to become a part of standard curricula. A minor, secondary project activity was improving parent/significant others' involvement in school life. This was done by means of organising extra curricular activities of various kinds (charitable, sporting, educational, entertainment) where students, teachers and parents would meet and enjoy their time as a community. This developed mutual understanding, increased parental support of the school and pupils and also provided time to have fun together fun, which is necessary for a complex and balanced way of education of today´s students. The most important result and impact was creating the sense of community and voluntary work in students (but also in teachers and significant others). For 2 partner schools this was the kick start of such activity whatsoever. Many of the students that took part in this project got to like and enjoy volunteering and are continuing regardless the fact that the project has finished. In all of the partner schools volunteering activities will be organized in future in one way or the other.