DORM (Adults On Reciprocal Mission) refers to a multilateral project carried out by 4 partners from Greece, Estonia, Italy and Romania. The central idea is the design, implementation, evaluation, documentation, dissemination, and exploitation of a new model of reciprocal collaboration between local communities and four EU member states. This model collaboration will surface the cultural heritage of the local communities in conjunction with a set of good practices and volunteer work of European adult citizens-in collaboration with agencies with respectable social work in their portfolios-towards people in need of solidarity. The main objective of the planned activities is to facilitate the mobility of adults, who would have a dual role as visitor and as volunteer, towards the partner local communities. Each partner will create several Local Working Groups (LWG) by collaborating with local cultural and social agencies. Next, they will organise a pilot 7-day hosting programme where 48 different adult citizens coming from the partner member states will participate. The hosting programme will include an educational/recreational part, which refers to acquaintance visits to the material, non-tangible, and digital local cultural monuments, as well as a social part, which refers to brief yet meaningful volunteer work at agencies or with people who are in need of them, in order to reciprocate for the aforementioned educational part. The type of the volunteer service will be preferably adjusted to each person’s professional or personal skills. Participants will be prepared beforehand for their service and cultural agencies will be called to prove their good practices to preserve of their national and/or local cultural heritage. The results of the pilot implementations of the hosting programmes as well as the ADORM model structure will be documented in a Guide pack, which will be the primary promotional material to be used in the following activities of dissemination, exploitation and multiplication. Implementations of the ADORM model will continue last the official end of the project in form of regular reciprocal activity among the members of the network. Efforts will be made to expand the network in more countries.
The main aim of the ADORM project was to highlight with concrete actions the social and educational dimension of cultural heritage as well as its cohesive capacity between citizens and within society. It sought to expand opportunities for participation in informal interactive learning and reciprocal educational offer and exchanges between adults of similar and different cultural backgrounds. It aimed to motivate citizens to travel to partner countries, to encourage and facilitate local partnerships and cooperation between cultural and social actors, to promote social responsibility, solidarity and targeted volunteering, to strengthen the sense of European identity and of European solidarity, especially between generations, to identify best cultural and social alternative tourism practices among partners and their local grass root agencies and organisations, to design, pilot and evaluate a new and alternative mobility model (ADORM Model) for European adults based on the principle of reciprocity, that is to offer voluntary solidarity services in return for the educational and cultural entertainment hospitality they receive.
The EU institutions recognized from a very early stage the value of culture as a lever for creating strong bonds between the peoples and communities that make it up. Dedicating 2018 as the year of cultural heritage they set ambitious goals to encourage citizens to discover and embrace Europe's cultural heritage and to strengthen the feeling of belonging to a common European space. The timing was right: The EU faces difficulties, looks rather tired and struggles to inspire citizens. European citizens are moving away from each other and entrenched in narrow national contexts. The recent pandemic and the war are pushing the European structure to its limits. The Adults On Reciprocal Mission (ADORM) project tried to take a modest initiative. With the cooperation of 4 EU countries (Greece, Estonia, Italy, Romania) and through informal learning actions, which encouraged the involvement of cultural, artistic and social actors, they tried to strengthen the identity and cohesion of rural local communities, to promote respect for cultural diversity and human creativity and to highlight the value of solidarity between the citizens and communities involved.