Involve! Include! Improve!
Our new group of EVS Volunteers arrived and we organised a meet up with the new volunteers, their mentors and previous EVS who still live in the UK. We posted this as a public gathering and welcomed anyone that wanted to learn more about EVS to join us.
Our Director, went to visit some of our international partners in Finland and Estonia. Reconnecting with former participants of projects and current EVS that we have sent from the UK. We met with our new Finnish partner EKO Energy and discussed how we can continue to work together in the future through EVS.
Engaging the local community, we hosted bunting making workshops and then the Little Sheffield Feast that brought together over 200 people to discuss local culture, volunteering opportunities and talk to them about our international work through Erasmus+. The event was supported by our EVS Volunteers.
Today we hosted a workshop about writing Erasmus Plus projects. Four young people attended the workshop. We went through a previous Youth Discovery Ventures funding application that was successful and discussed how the application works, funding deadlines, how to create a project and different types of projects. We also shared ideas for future projects.
In March 2017 Youth Discovery Ventures published an EVS call for our new EVS project in Sheffield, we received more than 300 applications in just three weeks. Reading and assessing all the applications was a tough procedure, but finding suitable candidates for the interviews turned out to be easier than we expected. Reading the cover letters, we noticed that too many candidates, even the more skilled and experienced ones, struggled to clearly express their specific interest in the project. Many cover letters contained irrelevant information and seemed to be sent, unmodified, to apply for more than one EVS project. Applying for different projects in the same period is a very natural and common practice for such a competitive scheme as EVS, but it’s important that aspiring volunteers understand that, in order to be really competitive, they should focus more on the quality of their production instead of simply sending out lots of applications. In a short video (that has at last count been watched 162 times) published on our website and on our Youtube channel we tried to explain what we’d like to read in a motivational letter and the mistakes not to make: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L28_WVvbjBI Giving these little tips we hope to help people interested in EVS can increase their chances to participate in a project that really matches their interests and aspirations, making an informed choice and achieving the maximum from their future EVS experience. As a social enterprise supporting young people, YDV participates in many festivals and events in the city of Sheffield, offering in particular children activities, including games and craft workshops. Alongside these activities, we always want to organise something to explain our involvement in Erasmus+ programme and promote our international projects.
With this purpose we’ve created a little game called “The European Challenge”, a simple activity where the participants have to pick a European country name from a hat and place it on a blank map. The game has proved to be an effective way to engage people, talk to them about EVS and Youth Exchanges and stimulate their curiosity about Europe and youth mobility. The EVS team we are hosting had a big role running this activity, sharing their experience and talking about their countries. Interacting with children and parents we noticed how, even after Brexit, british people are still interested in other European countries and their culture. Through this game we managed also to engage with young people in the EVS age group and explain more thoroughly how the programme is structured and what are the advantages to take part in it. The result of this little experiment were encouraging, allowing us to promote our international work even during events not strictly related to this area of interest. Improving this activity and developing similar others will therefore be a task we will work on to share our values and engage more people in European projects. In May 2017, we invited 2 future group leaders and 3 former group leaders to engage in a skype chat to discuss the responsibilities of being a group leader. It was a great opportunity to share learning and experiences and prepare the new leaders for their responsibilities.
The following notes were taken from the meeting and will form the basis of our briefing papers for all future group leaders. Notes on Skype Group Leader Briefing
In April 2017, Youth Discovery Ventures launched our latest call for hosting EVS in the UK. We decided that we would change our practice a bit and put more time and effort into our Information Pack as well as making it more interesting and shareable.
Using a programme called Canva: https://www.canva.com/ we created the below info pack. We then saved this as a PDF and as jpegs. The PDF we sent to our partners to distribute and the jpegs we uploaded on our website and social media as an album. The photos were shared many times and engaged a lot of people. In the end we received 300 applications in just 3 weeks! Not only did this format help to advertise abroad, but it also generated interest locally in what we were doing in an interesting way. On 23rd March, our EVS volunteer Clem organised an amazing event called Disco Soup. The event was a social event to come together, cook and eat food that would have gone to waste. Organisations were represented who are working in the area of food waste and trying to tackle this problem. The event was attended by around 80 people aged from 18 to 35. As the organiser of the event, Rachel and Clem from YDV also spoke about EVS and Erasmus+ and explained a bit about how Erasmus+ had made this event possible. It was a great event and we had 4 young people come up to us after the talk to discuss how they get involved more and participate in an EVS. Youth Discovery Ventures attended The University of Sheffield Refreshers Fair promoting our volunteering, youth exchange and EVS opportunities. We spoke to around 40 people with an attendance of 150 and made links with other organisations in the city working to promote international opportunities.
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