Hey there! IntegrART 8 speaking!
After some really busy time at work and with the on-arrival training, the International Volunteering Day finally came last Thursday! Of course it didn’t catch us off guard since we had been working on it for weeks. Want to know how it turned out? Then keep reading! 🙂
First of all, what’s the fuss about it? Well, on the 5th of December it was the International Volunteer Day, which is backed up by the United Nations and is all about recognizing the importance of volunteering. In the frame of IntegrART, it has become a tradition to celebrate it every year by hosting an event at 27 LO, the high school where Miguel works.
Its aim was to spread the word about volunteering opportunities and conditions as to encourage young people to pursue it. Therefore, Miguel and his coordinator Dominika’s insights about their motivations and needs was very important from the beginning. After crafting a written plan and having a meeting with Dominika to discuss our ideas and the resources we would need to bring them to life, everyone had some responsibilities assigned and we perfected our program.
It wasn’t so easy to bring everything to life since the on-arrival training took place during the two previous weeks and it made it difficult to meet and finally arrange everything, still we succedeed!
But what did we prepare? Well, we created different stations at the high school hall, where we would drag the students into an adventure to find out more about volunteering! But for such mission, they would also need to be prepared, right? That’s why we handed these volunteer passports to everybody, where they would find both more information about organizations that manage volunteering programs and more importantly, a space to fill up with stamps we had at each station so that they would get a prize after completing all of the activities.
The journey could start anywhere, but the first station, where we handed most of the passports and explained all about the event to them, was all about being creative! Around the idea of inclusion, we asked them to outline their hands and then write some nice wishes or ideas about how to help people inside. The mural was a success and we could tell there is some artistic talent in the school! Mostly Emma and I (your favorite ghost writer, Celia 👻) took turns to manage this station because it was both very rewarding and demanding to attend to so many people at once!
Then you could move onto Aile’s station and play a language game designed to get to know some words and not well known facts both about European countries and the language learning opportunities linked to the ESC programs. They were really engaged and curious about this, she almost couldn’t take a break!
But if Aile’s station was too busy, you could also go take a super nice pic at our photo booth station, where our personal photographer Claudia got to capture the best looking side out of every student. We thought they would be more shy, but it was really fun to see them so much into it! We also took one ourselves at the end, of course 🙂
And moving on to the next stand, we had what turned out to be the main attraction: the map game! For this we hang a huge mapamundi on the wall and Miguel asked the students to throw some magical sticky hands that would predict their future volunteering destinations, while Johanna would show them the opportunities they had in each country through the EU youth portal. They were very engaged with this, it seems that sticky hands are still very popular!
Finally, we had a nice corner with space to sit around so they could come and have a deeper conversation about volunteering, their interests, our experience so far, etc. We were also impressed to see that some of them had already volunteered or were considering it as a future option, and we also tried to provide them with more information about what the ESC programs include since due to the Matura exams being really close we couldn’t have the time or space for a presentation.
In short, it was all very exhausting but also satisfying and we ended up having a lot of fun! Again, special thanks to Dominika, Miguel and everyone at the high school that helped us with the preparation. See you again for the Multicultural Day!
