Volunteering Activities to Leverage Urban and European Social integration of migrants

ended

VALUES (Volunteering Activities to Leverage Urban and European Social integration of migrants) will use peer-to-peer knowledge exchange to build the capacity of city officials and volunteer organisations to facilitate the integration of migrants in cities. There will be 2 types of exchange: 1) ‘communities of practice’, will create clusters of cities around topics such as engaging migrants in volunteering and city/volunteer cooperation. City officials will visit each other for 3 days of workshops, sight visits (to selected volunteer organisations) and action planning, to identify and implement best practices, and overcome shared challenges. 2) ‘city staff and volunteer exchanges’, will see pairs of cities exchange 1 volunteer leader & 1 city staff member to get on-the-ground experience of volunteer organisations in the other city. This will erode information asymmetries and improving access to practical realities and local knowledge. The two types of visits will feed into each other: staff and volunteer exchanges will revise and fine tune the topics and activities of communities of practice and vice versa. Cooperation will mean limited resources are not wasted via duplication of work or via effective practices being blocked; 1 city or organisation will not get stuck on problems which another has learned to overcome, and effective solutions will not be hampered by excessive red tape. Similarly, volunteers and CSOs will be more cognisant of assistance that cities could or do already offer. Through wide dissemination of the results of VALUES over the medium and long term, all cities within and outside Europe, will be able to replicate and benefit from these results. Outputs such as toolkits, reports, videos and articles will enhance integration far and wide, long past the life of the project. Coordinated by EUROCITIES, with the support of Migration Work and the European Volunteer Centre (CEV), VALUES will engage 16 major European cities in active participation.