IVunited joins the European Solidarity Corps.
We are officially part of the European Union network, now able to start hosting volunteers through the Erasmus+ program.
We are delighted to announce this as our organization has acquired the European Solidarity Corps quality label which will allow us to start welcoming full-time volunteers for team projects of up to 2 months and long-term individual missions lasting between 2 and 12 months.
Our volunteers will be welcomed in dreamy regions of the South of Greece, hosted in one of our partnering network’s properties of sea-side holiday rentals and hotels, all expenses covered.
We are determined to share with our volunteering teams the kind of experience, projects and guidance we dreamed of when we first started volunteering.
Our name, IVunited, stands for Independent Volunteers United. Before we were an official organization, our attempt was to be an informal group of volunteers from resourceful corporate, scientific and digital fields able to bring tools and innovative development strategies to NGOs and causes in Mediterranean countries. A recurring issue however that we ran into in our 3 and a half year-long attempt to collaborate with national causes in Greece and Cyprus was the lack of ways to establish formal cooperation grounds between institutions and independent individuals to secure the long-term success of a project or initiative, as well as the many ways in which our lack of representation by a legal entity has come in the way of bringing solutions to situations that desperately needed them.
This origin story is important to us because of the way it built the DNA of our organization rooted in a strong focus on practical application approaches to complex issues and long-term strategic thinking about sustainable development solutions.
Since the founding of our NGO in Greece, we have traced back the lessons learned in the field from the point of view of capable volunteers. We are working on the progressive user-friendly automation of all our incubation methods, so that we can deliver tools driven by the most efficient and powerful strategies and methodologies around the world. We want to help coordinate philanthropic projects to facilitate the work towards the accomplishment of the SDGs.
For our organization, participating in the European Solidarity Corps is an opportunity to do so much more that much faster for our communities. Ultimately, most of our work is rooted in strategy and digitalization as a tool to pave the road for sustainable ethical progress and cooperation. Most of our experience and education comes from abroad and most of our work takes place between meetings with community leaders and public representatives and on our computers. The reality however is that for people who work outside of these fields, which is the case for most active community members we help, strategic and digital work, as well as international cooperative work are both vague concepts that can be intimidating or misunderstood to the point of being dismissed by the locals. Involving a number of volunteers that are able to be visibly active in our communities and work on specific activities that the community can visualize and understand easily will bring in momentum, and make our progress fast and tangible in the small towns and villages we support.
Additionally, our motivation is also a personal one. Our organization was named IVunited (Independent Volunteers United) because we believe that the volunteers’ point of view, and that of the first-time observer in the face of injustice and suffering in our societies, needs to be considered every step of the way as we nurture and build an organization that abides legalities and conventional bureaucratic and cultural norms of non-profit work, the quantity and weight of which can sometimes make us forget that we do philanthropic work with and for other people. Our focus is on changes and solutions that carry out a real long-term structural impact for the future of the places and people that we support. Those changes and solutions start with the people who are able to participate in these developments.
Ultimately solidarity, activism and sustainability is about nurturing our relationship with our lands and our people. In every volunteer we see potential allies, potential future collaborators, potential future incubees coming back to us with their own independent projects to bring change to their community back home. We see the European Solidarity Corps as an opportunity to share our methods, frameworks and drive with future change-makers, to prepare them for the creation of their own solidarity-driven legacy.
We want to provide our volunteers the type of guidance and structure that we wished we had when we first started volunteering ourselves.
Volunteer with IVunited
In order to become an ESC volunteer in an IVunited project, we will guide you through the official recruitment channels of the European Union.
Contact info@ivunited.org
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based in Greece
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