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Living Sustainability - Volunteering in Ecovillages
Start date: Feb 1, 2016, End date: Jul 31, 2016 PROJECT  FINISHED 

The project „Living Sustainability - Volunteering in Ecovillages“ consisted of a training and networking event for youth workers. It‘s overall purpose was to enable the participants to create high quality international volunteering projects for young people.The project included 7 partner organisations from 7 different countries: Denmark, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Spain and Sweden. It was coordinated by the Baltic Ecovillage Network (BEN).The project partners all belong to the ecovillage movement. An ecovillage is an intentional or traditional community that is consciously designed through locally owned, participatory processes to regenerate social and natural environments. The four dimensions of sustainability (ecology, economy, the social and the cultural) are all integrated into a holistic approach. Ecovillages act as living and learning centers involved in education for sustainable development for adults, youth and children. They offer a rich learning environment, both around ecological solutions as well as social skills and social innovation. There is a strong interest among young people to visit ecovillages and learn about their sustainable way of life. The ecovillages represented by the partner organisations want to respond to that by offering more opportunities to young people to come and live with them for a while as volunteers.To achieve this, they are in need for capacity building regarding all aspects of volunteer projects including project management skills. The training offered the opportunity to learn from volunteering projects that are already being carried out in other ecovillages. The participants explored a number of issues related to hosting young international volunteers like how to provide a rich learning experience for them, to deal with cultural diversity and to integrate them into their working structures as well as into the residential community at their ecovillages. During the training, participants started designing their own projects so they could go to their home countries with a project design plan that they could implement.The networking aspect of the training gave the participants the opportunity to establish personal contacts with colleagues from other countries who work in a similar field. This provided valuable connections for partnering in future projects.The 5-day training took place at Suderbyn Permaculture Ecovillage in May 2016. Suderbyn has several years of experience in hosting EVS volunteers. They met the participants of the training and shared their first hand experiences.The project has a strong multipler effect through the partners from Denmark, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Spain who are national ecovillage networks and will disseminate the outcomes of the project in their networks, thus spreading the information to even more organisations.

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