CDCD suține VOLFAIR Declaration, declarația produsă de cei 30 de tineri participanți la schimbul de tineri – Y-Active – 21 – 28 mai 2011 – la Craiova. Cei 30 de tineri din Slovenia, Turcia, România, Italia, Bulgaria și Polonia susțin implementarea unor programe de voluntariat pentru tinerii din mediul rural, programe care ar avea un impact deosebit asupra dezvoltării personale și profesionale a tinerilor din mediul rural.
VolFair Declaration
Y-Active – Action 1.1 – Youth in Action
Craiova – May 21st to 28th 2011
Participant countries: Romania, Turkey, Bulgaria, Poland, Slovenia, Italy
Due to the financial crisis and to the lack of active measures enacted by the authorities to promote active youth participation, the rural youth is lacking opportunities to get involved with volunteering activities. Thus, we consider that rural youth should be invested with opportunities to get involved with activities that would help their personal and professional development. For this purpose, the local authorities, the non-governmental actors, the institutions in charged with this group’s education, should start developing structured dialogue frames, programmes and projects aiming at offering rural youth with active youth participation frames and volunteering activities. The problem comes from the experiences shared by our group – 30 youngsters, representing 6 countries and over 12 regions. We are youngsters with experiences in volunteering and youngsters from the rural areas, eager to get involved with volunteering activities. We, volunteers in non-governmental organizations from Italy, Romania, Turkey, Bulgaria, Italy, Poland and Slovenia, gathered in Craiova, Romania, for 8 days, with the support of Youth in Action, on an Action 1.1 – Youth exchange and analyzed the situation of rural youth in the participant countries. Acknowledging the problems our rural peers are facing and as we strongly believe in the benefits that the volunteering programmes would be bringing to their personal and professional development, we, the participants of Y-Active are coming up with the following proposals:
– Developing support programmes in the communities, where the youngsters could support the elderly in accessing online information – It is common among adults and elderly people not to use Internet in order to receive information about daily things and this is an area where they could get some help from the younger generations. There a lot of fields that one could find information about in Internet. For instance, the train timetable; whether a book is available at the library; what and where are the best prices of all types of products; how to use Google map, including its numerous functions like finding the shortest way to reach a particular spot; online banking; Wikipedia; paying bills; Youtube; organized cultural events.
A way this could be done is by gathering the adults at various institutions willing to support the activity like the city library, schools and then the youngsters would explain them for an hour or two what are the possibilities Internet provides to simplify our daily life.
– Organizing youth exchanges involving rural and urban youth – Its main aim is deepening mutual understanding among youngsters by sharing interests: sports, music, writing, reading, etc. Each exchange would have its main topic, such as: voluntary, journalism, cooking, art activities, or social games.
The results of exchanges could be published at web site and local magazines, edited by redactors from city and rustic communities, or announced in local radio programme.
– Volunteering activities concentrated on helping farmers in their everyday work. Many farm owners look for people who could help them in planting vegetables, fruit trees or bushes, looking after live stock and other animals. Volunteering in such way can raise volunteering awareness of young people as well as teach them more practical things about farming and rural environment in which they live.
Such activities should be coordinated by school teachers and/or community leaders, who could find and contact farmers interested in such actions and participate in them together with school children.
– Organizing Rural Fairs to promote volunteering – There are three reasons a Rural Fair should take place as an important event. First, to promote cultural and traditional habits from rural regions into the big city. Second, to exchange lifestyles and opinions. Finally, to present agro tourism to the young people in the cities. As a result the number of the active youth familiar with the meaning and the importance of rural activities for their country will increase.
– Public centers for rural young volunteers – A public center for the people including both children, youngsters and adults who lives in rural areas can be feasible to make the people socialize, have sportive activities and personal trainings for their jobs or hobbies for free. Students, pupils and the other volunteers can work in these public centers by sharing their skills and knowledge about the other countries. In this public center, a network will be useful for getting knowledge about the rural areas problems and requirements. Therefore the people from rural areas can use this network to share their problems to ask for some help from other communities or associations. It will be more useful to help voluntarily if the problems are known by the associations.
We do believe that volunteering is a new way of life and definitely would help rural youth to develop itself personally and professionally! We are volunteers and we know that our actions can change the world! We believe in change and we know that our rural peers can make a change!
The Y-Active Group
Craiova / May 23rd 2011
