Several Alliance members develop specific projects to raise young people awareness about sustainability issues and to improve their own working methods and practices by meeting with other organisations and realizing joint trainings. These are some of the projects implemented by Alliance members.
Alliance members carry out a variety of great projects with special emphasis on environmental issues. The Sustainability Booklet is a collection of sustainable work camp projects from different countries and organizations, which may serve as a source of inspiration for new ideas and projects; it has to be spread among camp leaders and local organisers in order to share best practices and to improve the sustainability of the projects.
The Cookbook is the result of two projects which involved an international group of volunteers coming from different European countries. With the help of VJF and the financial support of the European Youth Foundation, the volunteers gathered “recipes” to concretely fight against climate change in the everyday life and work.
“The protection of the environment is widely discussed and agreed in most societies. Therefore we thought: Stop talking, start acting! This toolkit stems from our firm believe that everybody has to contribute on a local level in order to change behavior that leads to the process of climate change.”
This international training was organised and hosted on May 2012 by Vir’Volt & Solidarités Jeunesses and financed by the YOUTH IN ACTION Programme of the European Commission. Roots of this project is a common willingness among international voluntary service organisations’ networks to share our concerns about the nowadays’ ecological context and to gain awareness on the different environmental, social and economical issues in the framework of voluntary actions (EVS, international workcamps etc.).
Several Alliance members organisations participated to the training. The results of their work, a description of the activities and links to useful resources on sustainability and volunteering, can be viewed online at the T4VSD wiki page. A video, with comments from the organizers and some participants, was produced. Here you also download a useful toolkit, “Being a green volunteer“, that contains concrete suggestions on how to make a workcamp more eco-friendly.