Innovation: Volunteering and Community Service promotion

Czech Republic

AAI Domains:

• Independent, healthy and secure living (care to children, care to older adults, mental well-being)

• Participation in society (voluntary activities, social connectedness)

There is strong evidence that volunteering and community service has a wide range of health and well-being benefits for individuals, groups and communities. However, social participation through volunteering as part of a thriving civic culture is often not a feature of EU member states of central and eastern Europe although this is changing with the passage of time and socially innovative projects that promote volunteering.

The Czech Healthy Cities Network, with financial support from the European Social Fund and the Czech Human Resources and Employment Operation and in partnership with the Baltic Association of Healthy Cities and the Slovak Voluntary Centre, worked with municipalities to develop successful volunteering opportunities. The Volunteering and Community Service performed by unemployed in municipalities was a two year project that ran from 2011–13 with five sites involved from the start: Prachatice, Vsetin, Opava and Usti nad Labem, the city of Sobeslav and the Healthy Vysocina Region.

The project involved providing training to mobilise volunteers for the benefit of local communities and unemployed participants for whom it improved their employability. An important legacy of the project were websites for the promotion of volunteering that contained a range of good practice examples and a database of volunteer opportunities that allows organisations to seek volunteers and individuals to offer their time for social good.

The database covers a wide range of volunteering opportunities including health care, social services, culture, sport, with children and youth, in emergence and ecology. It also provides good practice guidance on working with volunteers including recruitment and selection, training, responsibilities of volunteers, relationships between volunteers and paid staff, volunteers and clients, supervision and retention.

This work upholds the ethos of the Universal Declaration on Volunteering developed by the International Association for Volunteer Effort that ‘we the people have the power to change the world in everyday life as a creative and mediating force that builds healthy and sustainable communities.’ There is a process of accreditation for organisations to complete so that good practices are entrenched and recognised to ensure that volunteering is beneficial to all of the parties involved.

In relation to active ageing, the database of opportunities for voluntary work is directly aimed at encouraging voluntary activities among adults of all ages and there are numerous examples of how volunteer programmes operate in a variety of settings. One of the basic tenets of volunteering is that it builds social connectedness between people who give their time freely or benefit from these efforts and this process has positive effects on mental well-being.

Websites

Healthy Cities

Národní síť Zdravých měst ČR

Dobrovolník