The Czech Republic is situated in the heart of Europe with a capital in Prague, which is with a population of about 1 million inhabitants its real thumping spot. It is a political, economical, administrative, cultural and historical centre of the Czech Republic situated in a valley along the both sides of the river Vltava. Prague offers not only many cultural and sport opportunities indoor, but its green parks, forests and hills slightly invite for an outdoor trip to nature. Many interesting historical sights are to be visited in the close surroundings and for those who are interested in exploring the whole republic: it takes only four-six hours to get from the west to east corner

Duha and local groups
Joining Reach the Rainbow, the volunteers will be co-hosted by one of the local groups of the organisation in the first part of the project and by the Duha central office in Praha in the second half of the project. The volunteers will be involved in the daily work of the local groups, whose activities differ depending of the specific field of work of each local group (as briefly described in the description of organisation above) and environment they live and work in. The local groups are located in all the Czech republic, specially concentrated around the big towns such as Prague, Ostrava, Olomouc, Krnov, Plzen etc. The shared commonalities are pursuits of the youth and children involvement towards active participation in the society and meaningful spending of the free time. Therefore they organise summer camps and outdoor activities.


Duha and international level

As we want to discover the potential of transfer of added value from international - central - local level and other way round in this project, we want to involve not only the international dimension of the central programme Trochu jinak being run in Duha office, but as well our international organisation International Young Naturefriends (IYNF), who has been working in the fields of outdoor, environmental and art non-formal education, youth participation and youth policy. It runs long-term campaigns, seminars, study sessions, youth exchanges, produces diverse publications and represents its members towards European bodies. IYNF is a member of the European Youth Forum and UNITED - European network against nationalism, racism, and fascism and in support of migrants and refugees. It has approximately 130 000 individual members in 20 European, countries. IYNF's target group is young people of our national Member Organisations within the Naturefriends movement, volunteers in youth organisations and more generally young people in Europe.
IYNF office is situated in the same building in Prague as Duha's office. There is a good and communicative relationship in between both of the offices based on cooperation towards the same aims in youth work.

Duha is a partner organisation of Service Civil International (SCI) - the world peace movement with branches and partners almost all over the world. SCI is our main exchange partner for the work camps and some of the long term volunteering projects.

Proposed activities for EVS volunteers

There are two projects available to join in Duha. The individual one year project Information on Rainbow Youthwork and the group EVS project Reach the Rainbow (4 - 7 months long).

Information on Rainbow Youthwork

Information on Rainbow Youthwork is a project which wants to contribute to spreading out the information about voluntary possibilities for youth within the Trochu jinak programme in Duha and facilitate the opportunities for young people to get involved. Trochu jinak programme is based on the work of volunteers and constantly tries to develop the sustainable voluntary environment, which would be open for young people to join and stimulate them to value volunteering as an alternative way to live an active life and participate in the society. The project aims to connect the local, national and the international level through contacting the people, transfering the experiences, explaining the opportunities and trying to stree the added value of a strong interlink between the local - national - international level of youthwork. The project provides space to get new experiences while working with volunteers in order to undrestand the specifity of volunteering on all the levels.

The project host 1 to 2 volunteers at the time, they always start in different periods and are involved in a bit different tasks. Still, they support each other.

The volunteer will be involved in a daily work of the Trochu jinak programme in order to understand all dimensions of our tasks and be acquainted with the permanent contact with volunteers. The main aim of the project is to involve an EVS volunteer into the dynamic environment of the programme as well as the rest of office. The general objectives are: To allow the volunteer to contribute to the coordination of the Trochu jinak programme based on his/her preferences; to spread out information and improve communication with young people (members as well as non-members of Duha), and support coordination of Czech volunteers who want to get active in one or other way in the Trochu jinak programme.

The specific objectives for the next three years are foreseen as following:
Work camps related: to help to motivate volunteers to join evaluation meetings of work camps, to offer them attractive voluntary opportunities in the Czech republic, to support them in their volunteering and developing of their activities which aim to help the society. To develop know - how methods of involving short - terms volunteers within the Trochu jinak programme in different ways (e.g. writing articles, helping with contacting people, collecting the activities to the calendar, etc.) as well as monitoring the personal motivations to volunteer on the long term basis.

Long term volunteering related: to find ways to inform right people about the voluntary possibilities, to support volunteers in searching for their placement, to help to develop strong EVS network, to start to build a creative support structures for EVS volunteers (abroad as well as in Duha).

Tamjdem related: to enlarge the knowledge about Czech NGO reality (getting to know both the inner and outside factors), to develop an independent project according to her/his interest, to involve the new volunteers into this programme, to support them with their local initiatives, to help to enlarge the project into the long term perspective format.

Support and training opportunities
The volunteer will come to the environment of not only a national organisation, but as well an organisation working on international level. S/he can be involved as a participant in international trainings seminars on different topics according to the volunteers" interest and the priorities of the work plan of Duha. S/he can help with organising pre-arrival trainings for Czech volunteers going abroad and a camp leader training. If s/he is interested, s/he can become a part of a training team.



Reach the Rainbow

The volunteers involved in this project will get an opportunity to explore the field of youth work within the Czech Republic and its international dimension. This will be guaranteed by joining the international activities being organised either by the local groups, by the Duha from the central level or by IYNF. During their EVS the volunteers will gain a bright overview into the life of one of the biggest youth association in the Czech Republic, its reality, challenges, and problems. Being involved in the local, central and international dimension of the organisation, the volunteers will have a chance to contribute to a long term process of searching for an identity of the organisation, supporting to spread out the awareness of Duha' s values into the local groups and also to a broad public. Face to face interviewing of Duha members as well as collecting the needs of the local groups towards the central and international level - that will be the concrete actions of the volunteers. These actions will help to identify the current internal situation of Duha and will potentially serve as a motive power for appropriate steps contributing to development of an attractive youth association based on shared and lived values, understanding of added value of international youth work on the local level, and active volunteers involved at all the levels of Duha. The volunteers will be motivated to sum up their investigative work into an attractive and informative material about Duha. The elaboration of information media, resulted from the group sharing of experience will take place in the last part of the project in Duha central office. This material covering the needs of the central and the local communities together with evaluation of the volunteers will meld the future of the project.

The project will last four months for the group of EVS volunteers. The volunteers will spend their first two months in the local (or international) organisation of Duha to experience the atmosphere and to get to know the reality of the youthwork. For the last two months the group of volunteers will come together again and will work on the materials they collected during the first two experiential moths. There will be one person who will stay longer - after the project is over - to help to work out the plan of implementation the outcomes of the project to Duha. The volunteers will be coordinated by team of people in Duha, consisting of an EVS volunteer, the local group coordinator and the EVS coordinator, who will be involved into preparation, implementation and evaluation part of the project. They will help the volunteers to create their action plans and will be also involved in the project in different phases and ensure the communication with all people involved, facilitating the process and encouraging the volunteers as well as the coordinators from the organisations involved.

July - August

There will be an introductory week for the volunteers organised as the start of their EVS programme. The volunteers will get acquainted with Duha, get to know more about local groups and the overall idea of the central project. We will provide them with an intensive language course of Czech, so they will be able to use the survival Czech. We will also support the group in working with Medias aiming to improve the group skills towards a better communication of their experience in their projects. The volunteers will also make a plan for their project.

The volunteers will join the local group and IYNF in their summer programme within the two first months. There will be one or two volunteers involved in each of the organisation. The main aim of this part of the project is to get to know the work of the organisation and help to organise summer activities such as summer camps, outdoor events, or other daily work of the organisations (e.g. in the daily open clubs for kids and youth, centre for Gypsy kids, coordination office for the activities, etc.). Making interviews with the members, collecting their contacts, ideas and needs, the volunteers will gather the material for compiling the information material for Duha, which they will intensively work on during the second part of the project. The volunteers will be motivated to visit the local groups of all the volunteers involved as well as some other summer activities of Duha to enlarge the amount of source material for their final outcome.

September - October
These two months are dedicated to the central level of Duha. The volunteers will join the preparation and running of two international workcamps and a weekend meeting of Duha' s local groups. During this, they will finalise collecting their source materials and will be motivated to sum up their investigative work into an attractive and informative material about Duha. They will be encouraged to discuss about Duha in the eyes of EVS volunteers with Duha representatives and volunteers. The concrete outcomes are expected in following areas: Duha as an attractive youth association, report on the needs of the local groups, intercultural potential in Duha, cooperation between local - central - international level, benefits of the international experience in the local level.

November - January
This phase of the project will be realised only by one EVS volunteer. The main aim of a prolong stay is to work further with the outcomes of the group investigation, discussions and report. The volunteer will work from the central office, closely communicating with the international and local level, developing a plan of follow up for the outcomes of the project. The volunteer will also be encouraged to prepare a new edition of this project, communicating with the local groups and shaping the project towards needs of the organisation.


Volunteer profiles and recruitment process

The volunteers involved in this project needs motivation to work with children and youth, flexibility and will to understand and communicate are desired personal traits. Basic English skills are mandatory, as this language is established as the common language between the EVS group.

The selection process will aim to get a heterogeneous group with diverse cultural backgrounds and also with different fields of interest (like social animation, all kind of arts, multimedia and web design, journalism, outdoor sports education, organisational development etc). We will encourage the group to share their knowledge and prepare workshops for each other in specific fields (e.g. how to use a camera, how to prepare and run a game, how to make a leaflet, etc.) and of course will support this process.

The recruitment process will be done in cooperation with the international partners of Duha and is open as well for new partner organisations. We want to open the project for volunteers from Partner countries as well, especially those with a Slavic origin (Russia, Ukraine, Balkan countries), as we do hope the language similarities could help the volunteers to quickly understand a bit the Czech language. In reality, the local coordinators do not always understand English. We will keep special attention if the volunteers and the coordinators can communicate together during the project in the organisations and support their communication with help of a mentor.

For the Information on Rainbows Youth work we try to keep the geographical, gender and competence balance among the two volunteers, so we can support the variety of experience and cultural back grounds.


Special needs (if applicable)

We open the project also for young people with cultural differences and geographical difficulties. Currently, Duha has focused on creating and strengthening the EVS partnership network organisation, where some sending organisations from the Partner countries participate. We believe that we will be able to enhance this cooperation and invite their volunteers to our project despite of the visa problems.

We already do have en experience with hosting a volunteer from Ukraine with all its positive and negative aspects concerning language competency, visa arrangements and practicalities with the sending organisation. Having this experience we are strongly motivated to fight with the official obstacles with visa in order to enlarge the mobility of these volunteers within Europe. We do hope that also the Agency and he Commission will support that and make concrete steps to contribute to improvement of the situation in general.

As a team of the international volunteers in Duha who are involved in coordination of this project, we are generally quite sensitive towards cultural differences. Duha and IYNF have a lot international experience and at the moment are involved in developing a project focusing on the topics of inclusion and intercultural learning through amateur art.

We would like to support the volunteers with strong mentorship. In order to manage to find appropriate people for that, we plan to ask the help of the members of hospitality club in the Czech Republic - especially in smaller towns, where it could be difficult to find people interested in mentoring. The Hospitality club is an organisation based on trust and openness to different cultures.

The project time is flexible for the volunteers who practise regularly any kind of religious habits.


Risk prevention, safety and protection

During the first meeting with all the volunteers, they will be informed about all the first aid numbers in the Czech Republic (112, 158, 155, 150 ) to be aware about them in case any accident would happen. In the local as well as the central project, the volunteers will talk with their coordinators about the working safety rules and principles, about the possible dangers and standards.

We accept only volunteers above 18 years old. Some of the local groups might demand the volunteer to present his/hers criminal record for security reasons (if they requires that from leaders of the groups according to their standards).

The project coordinators will be in regular communication with the organisations as well as the volunteers to monitor if everything is going right. In case of any crisis, the coordinators would facilitate a process of conflict resolution.

http://ec.europa.eu/youth/evs/aod/hei_form_en.cfm?EID=26000164301