The Strategic Partnership for Access to Volunteering is a cross-European research and development project with the core aim of increasing the inclusion of young people with disabilities in volunteering projects. The project is based on feedback and research from previous volunteering projects which identified access for youth with disabilities to volunteering projects as limited and often completely disabling. Young people with disabilities are known to face multiple barriers to being able to actively participate in volunteering projects. Barriers include such things as physical access, lack of accessible resources, no access to additional support from the application stage to project completion, lack of knowledge and understanding of different disabilities, and lack of consideration for inclusion at the planning and project design stage. This project aims to address this through developing a simple toolkit to enable organisations to design and implement more inclusive projects. The active engagement of young people with disabilities ensures their perspectives and experiences help shape the final product and that the project itself is fully inclusive. Delivered through a partnership of 4 organisations based in the UK, Romania, Italy and North Macedonia, and led by International Service, a UK international development organisation, the project brings together an extensive base of disability, youth, volunteering and educational expertise and experience. The core partners are International Service (UK) CYA Krik ( North Macedonia), Ferfilo ( Italy) and Offensiva Tirenilo ( Romania). The key components of the project are: - an initial phase of research - the development of a toolkit for training - testing and finalising this toolkit with youth workers, youth with disabilities and partner staff - delivery of initial training using the toolkit -production and sharing of an on line toolkit for training which supports the development of youth work practice around inclusive volunteering. The research investigates the barriers and challenges faced by young people living with disabilities which hinder their active participation in youth volunteering projects. The project partners will engage 75 organisations in each of the four countries which work with people living with disabilities to collect information from their members or beneficiaries. At least 200 people per country will be contacted to ensure the basis of the research is robust. Through collation and analysis of this information and feedback, a research report will be created. The research report will inform the creation of a training toolkit which will be able to be used by any organisation which carries out youth volunteering projects, to help them become more inclusive. The toolkit will be tested with a group of mainstream youth workers and young people with disabilities, and then refined before being shared more widely. The overall intended impact of this project is increased knowledge and understanding of the challenges facing young people living with disabilities and their access to volunteering, as well as increased inclusion of these young people in cross-European volunteering projects through the use of the training toolkit and applying this learning and guidance in project planning and practice.
We hope to draw attention to the barriers felt by young disabled people to participation in national and international volunteering programmes, and explore why few youth organisations explicitly encourage applications from disabled young people. We will seek to identify correlations and contrasts from both data sets (young people - particularly disabled young people and volunteering organisations), exploring ideas such as the 'perception gap' of difficulty bias often held around engaging disabled people, in an extensively researched report with accessible summary infographics for at-a-glance overviews. We will explore literature and national data to understand the extents of exclusion, and explore these within wider volunteering theory - specifically the academic, social and cultural benefits of engaging with volunteering as a youth. After this, we will collate a select array of appropriate resources to design a toolkit. We intend to undertake community testing with young disabled people and youth workers from across all participating countries to stress test these toolkits to ensure they embed better accessibility practice in a way that is realistic and achievable to the organisations, while meeting the needs of the youth.
Young disabled people often face multiple barriers to being able to engage with volunteering opportunities at local and international level. This project seeks to engage with disabled and non-disabled people and youth volunteering organisations across the UK, Romania, North Macedonia and Italy to generate data that will aid our understanding of the reasons underpinning these barriers from the perspectives of youth and organization, to enable us to build information and resources that address data-led potential alternatives to current practice that are more appropriately suited to overcoming these barriers We will commit to improving our own professional practice in response to what we've learnt through our project, and share our learnings to contribute to the development of an international volunteering community that holds space for better disability inclusion. We will each undertake social research in our respective countries, and share our learnings collectively to build an image of the challenges faced across Europe, and go on to utilize this knowledge to design engaging and meaningful resources and toolkits that address and seek to overcome these barriers and mainstream better inclusivity in the sector