As societies, we strive for inclusion and non-discrimination, and inclusive volunteering is one way to offer meaningful participation possibilities for youth. Sensitive encountering of the youngsters and acknowledging their skills and autonomy individually despite of challenges in certain areas of life, creates them an increasing sense of significance and an experience of influencing opportunities. This increases well-being and personal growth also in other parts of the life of the youngsters. Often the need for support in some area of life is perceived as an obstacle to participation. But that is not the case, on the contrary the potential within these young people is huge, it just sometimes needs to be channeled with support from professionals or mentoring volunteers. In Vol'Go! we wanted to open the concepts of inclusive volunteering and mental health sensitivity, to create structures and guidelines for more accessible and inclusive volunteer management, and to create operating instructions for the use of a mental health-sensitive approach as an empowering working method in youth work and inclusive volunteering management for youngsters recovering from mental health problems or otherwise challenging circumstances.
Voluntary work is a way to reinforce one’s activity, personal development, inclusion and participation in society. It gives one a possibility to concretely act in their community and to get a feeling of self-capability and autonomy. In Vol'Go! we focused on youth suffering from mental health problems or other reasons to exclusion, that might increase a need for more guidance and support in their volunteering process. The threshold for youth participating in volunteering should be as low as possible, despite of different social barriers, and also when the volunteering takes place in another European country. It’s also important to raise awareness about the potential of inclusive volunteering programs, and to ensure that the inclusive volunteering management for youth has defined structures and trusted networks; participating must be safe and the approach of youth workers needs to be mental health sensitive. In many countries the concept of inclusive volunteering is not widely recognized among other volunteering activities, and in Vol'Go! we wanted to create materials and guidelines to help understanding and organizing inclusive volunteering programs for youth, and to train youth workers about the mental health sensitive approach.