"The aim of the People to People project was to exchange experience in the development of volunteering with three foreign partners - the Czech Republic, Poland and Bulgaria. The project was based on the need for international sharing and transfer of good practice to our regional conditions. The partners have been deliberately selected to engage in volunteering, but in different areas (eg mentoring programs, community volunteering, youth work). So the organization RADKA z.s. (Kadan, Czech Republic), which has been offering the services of a volunteer center since 2006, became a partner. The activities of the volunteer center are general and focus primarily on sending volunteers to publicly beneficial organizations in the region. Another partner was the BB-BS of the Bulgarian Association (Plovdiv, BG), which is the national association of the Big Brothers Big Sisters program, in the Czech Republic known as the „Pět P“ Program. It is volunteering focused on mentoring relationships of volunteers and children at risk of social exclusion. The third partner was the organization Centrum ds.Katastrof i Klesk Zywiolowych TRATWA (Wroclaw, PL), which replaced the original Polish partner before the start of the project activities (consulted and approved by the NA). TRATWA has many of experience with young volunteers (national and foreign), which addresses in their natural environment through their community events. The project held 10 partnership meetings organized by individual partners in their countries with related topics. From every meeting there was created a record (description of good practice), that other project partners tried to implement in their activities. This implementation was evaluated after about 3 months in the form of written output. All meetings resulted in a clear list of all shared topics and evaluation of subsequent practice in other organizations. The result of the project is the introduction of new procedures in the management of volunteering, which individual partners are trying to spread in their regions (one of the points was also the networking of organizations). Some areas were not implemented, but this was also the aim of the project - to identify and map possible obstacles to further development, eg missing legislation, financing methods, etc. The target group, which gain the long-term benefits from the project, are not only the participants of the partnership meetings, but also the representatives of other organizations, volunteers, recipients of volunteer help, local community, etc. Professionalization of volunteering is still a ""discovered"" theme in our countries, and so some benefits will emerge in the longer-term horizon. However, it was also beneficial to build partnerships in other joint projects and activities, including networking with new organizations in each country."

The partners of « the Good, the Youth and the Volunteer » project, all active in the field of international volunteering and users of the EVS programme, felt the need to reflect about their daily practice, to exchange, between experienced persons, on the mechanisms (good practices) to maintain, develop and adapt in order to guarantee the quality and the accessibility of international volunteering and thus the success of youth and social inclusion policies, especially for the young people with fewer opportunities. The impact study ordered by the European Commission and published in April 2017 highlighted in its conclusions the need to implement support actions in order to improve quality and accessibility of the programme. Our project provided answers to these needs. The project objectives were the following : - ensuring quality of the volunteering experiences for young people with fewer opportunities and especially in the search for a balance between social impact and the learning dimension. - gathering experienced coordinators to reflect together on identifying good and less good practices of the field - offering the adapted framework to exchange in depth and to capitalize on our mutual experiences - experimenting new methodologies to work with young people with fewer opportunities, identified within the consortium and developed and adapted during the project - succeeding in transferring good practices to a new context or target group - involving volunteers, interested youth, ex-volunteers in the reflection for a better adequation to their needs - being able to measure the efficiency of the support and the impact of international volunteering on the participants, the organisations and the local community - presenting the fruit of these exchanges to the public and especially the key stakeholders related to international volunteering, in order to disseminate as largely as possible the best practices and favour an increase in the support of public authorities To do so, we produced a booklet of good practices and a Quality Charter compiling all our resources on the topic.These documents were created by the consortium following a process of : research, experimentation, capitalisation and dissemination. The cycle included job shadowing mobilities for volunteering coordinators and a final seminar to exchange, share and disseminate towards volunteers, tutors, mentors, key stakeholders and institutional partners.