CONTEXT: all organisations participating in the project have been involved in EVS/ESC for years and have developed substantial expertise over the years. This project aims to exchange these ideas and experiences, so that the expertise that is present within each partner, is used in the most effective way. OBJECTIVES: This project introduces a new way of thinking, a new way of learning and a new way of collaborating. We introduce peer to peer auditing as a tool that stimulates learning within and between organizations, with the aim to improve the quality of European Solidarity Corps projects. Quality is identified in formulated quality indicators that refer to parts of the peer to peer audit proces. NUMBER AND PROFILE OF PARTICIPANTS: the project works with 3 partners from Italy, Germany and The Netherlands. All partners have extensive experience in hosting/sending EVS or ESC volunteers and aim to improve the quality of their services and strive for excellence in ESC projects. DESCRIPTION OF ACTIVITIES: Transnational meetings are used to experiment with the peer to peer audit concept. The framework and content that are needed to execute the peer to peer audit is developed by all partners and will be available online. For a peer to peer audit there are at least two parties involved: an auditor and an auditee: these are roles executed by the partners of the project as part of the pilot. The auditor questions the auditee about a variety of subjects that are related to the ESC project that the auditee is involved in. This process is set up in such a way that self reflection and honest communication is stimulated. METHODOLOGY the methodology that is used can be seen as a new humanistic approach to focus on learning from each other, establishing equal relationships and promoting self responsibility to improve quality. It can be seen as a bottom up approach that acknowledges the expertise that exists on an operational level. RESULTS AND IMPACT: The intellectual output of the project will be a complete framework that is ideally used for peer to peer audit; however it can also be used for a self assessment focussing on quality improvement. To stimulate the use of the outcomes, all (future) organisations that work together with the partners and that are involved in ESC activities, will be introduced to the method, so that the use of the concept and materials gradually increases. From a modern humanistic point of view, the project aims to establish new, 21st century working relations that are characterised by equality, democratic learning, learning by sharing, motivation to learn (from others) and a decrease of hierarchic structures.
The main idea behind the project was to develop tools and a conceptual methodology to work with partner organisation on quality improvement activities, focussing on peer to peer audits. The idea was to accomplish this with equal partners that have experience on an operational level. The objectives can be summarised as follow: 1. develop materials that support the execution of peer to peer audits. 2. pilot the execution of peer to peer audits, based on a methodology that guaranteers a transparant, reproducible way of working. 3. properly analyse the process of ESC projects so that all phases of an ESC project can be covered by the different elements of the methodology 4. develop a manual that allows inexperienced users to directly implement the use of the work sheets that are developed as part of the methodology. At the start of the project, we used the time to reach a common understanding about the general objectives and ideas; this was an essential objective too: since it was a new and innovative approach for us all, we had to use a substantial amount of time to ensure we as partners and individual representatives had similar ideas on what we would like to achieve. This was done in the first transnational meeting (online).
With both partners in our smal consortium we have been working together for years, but we hardly talk about quality, nor do we discuss our personal organisation specific approaches. We thought this to be a shame, because we believe it is important to discuss quality in order to be able to improve quality (together). Discussing quality within one's own organisation is relevant, but talking about quality with other organisations can be way more refreshing, because of possible different approaches that allows us to learn from each other. The equality among partners was a highly valued element for the different partners involved. There is no hierarchy between partners which allows open discussion: this was a precondition for the partners involved: discussing relevant ESC related topics in an open, non-hierarchical way. It was exactly what the consortium was looking for, in order to achieve the goals of the project.