Volunteer Management Workshop, 17th IAVE World Volunteer Conference

In a globalizing world, international volunteering has become increasingly popular in the last few years. It also has become clear that, when launching and coordinating an international project, the often-used "top-down" approach is not always the most effective. Through the crossroads of international volunteering, people from the South and the North can learn a lot from each other by exchanging ideas and know-how. When volunteering for a cause or a particular topic such as human rights, peace and/or international cooperation, volunteers get a chance to learn about current global issues. With new ways of volunteering, new challenges appear, both for the volunteer project managers and the volunteers.

Presentation
Based on our experience with handling volunteers for international conferences and projects both in Europe and Africa, the aim of the present workshop was to look at good practices of how to mobilize volunteers internationally and the challenges faced when doing so.

In the first part of our presentation, we looked at the following stages of project realization:

1. Planning
2. Creation of recruitment and selection tools
3. Recruitment of volunteers
4. Training of volunteers
5. Coordination of volunteers
6. Follow-up

The second part of the workshop provided participants with the opportunity to brainstorm in small groups on how to address some of the challenges related to international volunteering. The proposed themes included: volunteer recruitment and media; selection process of international volunteers; integration of international volunteers into a volunteer team; relation between paid staff of a project and volunteers; volunteer motivation and burn out; volunteer training and skills building; evaluation process for volunteers; cultural and linguistic differences among international volunteers.

Conclusions
Participants then presented the results of their discussion to the group.