Lords of Volunteers v Brně

Jeden z účastníků námi pořádaného tréninkového kurzu sepsal své dojmy a postřehy. Jedná se o tréninkový kurz s názvem „The Lord of volunteers“, financovaný programem Erasmus+, který se konal v datech 14. – 21.10.2017 na Švýcárně nedaleko Adamova. 
We spent the whole week by learning about volunteering experience. I was meeting participants one by one and almost all of them were working with volunteers or were preparing a NGO to deal with volunteers. The week was very intensive and productive for me. I will remember a road between mountains full of endless curves and the building Švýcárna on the end. I must say I enjoyed it a lot.

From Brno to Africa

Markéta and Iva from Mladiinfo Czech were the coordinators of the event. On the beginning we played few games to remember our names and after pretending we remember all of them we were ready to start to learn.

The week was full of events and conferences which were really interesting. The topic relating every event was volunteering, and most of the participants were working with volunteers or with a NGO.

The first day was the turn of Jaroslav Ostrčilík. He shared with us his experience of a succesful story of one the activist organitzations being able to change the minds of Brno’s people to respect about how we see the past. It was useful in encouraging other organizations to be against misusing the official historical speech for political purposes.

Other interesting organization was Frank Bold in Brno. It was born as a legal platform of lawyers protecting the enviroment and society and nowadays they mix the work of representation of their clients with new young lawyers ready for work for fair issues.

There were more useful speeches always about volunteering, for example two girls who were in Africa helping People in Need. They shared their story with us, which was one of the most impressive in the whole week.

To be active 24/7

Day after day we were paying attention in every event. Usually in the mornings we had games to cooperate in groups to realize how the work with volunteers is. But it’s really difficult to pay attention all days in the whole week. For that reason it was really useful to be all together at nights to chill out and to know each other better. And as you can imagine, 24 new friends can make a really good entertainment, because everyone has at least one good conversation.

The only bad side was a lot of working hours with a lot of conversation and of course – the end of the training. The attention last days was notably lower comparing to the beginning, but that is natural. For me as a participant the week was intensive, but sure less intensive than for organizers Iva and Markéta.

We discussed a lot of topics related to the volunteering – the management of volunteers, volunteer’s needs, how the organisations can involve volunteers of European Voluntary Service etc. All the workshops and excursions were very contributive and I think everyone could find their topic of interest.

The trainning week was about to finish. Saying goodbye is weird because you just met your new friends one week ago. The bad thing is that it is difficult to see each othter again, but maybe that makes the week more romantic.

I guess I can speak for all of the participants and say – thank you for this project!

Projekt The Lord of Volunteers byl financován v rámci programu Erasmus+.