Institute for Social Services (IfS) in the province Vorarlberg in Austria is a Limited Liability Company that has been found by an association. It’s a non-profit-organisation serving the public good, that is financially supported by the government of the province Vorarlberg.
The IfS offers people help that have a psychologically or social emergency. Professional qualified people such as psychologists, social workers, family counselors, integration counselors, pedagogues, and so on work together in a team of about 350 people. The IfS is politically independent, denominational unbound and in all regions of Vorarlberg presented.
The headoffice of the organisation is situated in Röthis, and there are about 30 departments all over the province of Vorarlberg.
The IfS offers help and solutions for different questions and problems in the social area.
One offer of IfS is the department IfS-Spagat, where the person from EVS would be working in.
Spagat is a model for the integration of young people with severe disabilities into the open labour market and thus assists them to obtain and retain paid employment. By focusing on peoples´ abilities rather than on their disabilities, Spagat promotes the integration of people with disabilities into society. One of the specific aspects of Spagat is to built connections between people that are very important for the disabled person and to integrate them into the development of the project (parents, teachers, family, friends, etc.). This aspect is called the personal support circle.
Objective of the service is the professional and social integration of school graduates with severe disabilities.
Target groups are young people with severe mental or physical disabilities requiring support and who want to work in the open labour market and want to live as all others do.

The service has existed since 1997 and serves at the moment about 250 clients with disabilities.
22 employees are split into 5 regions within the province of Vorarlberg. In every region the employees will find an office to use, but they are doing lots of work also outside of the office.

selection:
Most of all, the EVS volunteer should like to work with people with severe disabilities. It’s not necessary to have a lot of experiences with people with disabilities, but he/she should have a positive and open-minded attitude concerning this group of people. He/she should see things rather with a smile than a crying eye. The EVS volunteer should have the interest and motivation to learn new things and make new experiences in this social area and with this target group.
The EVS volunteer should be self-reliant and courageous to get into new situations. He/She should not be afraid of working by himself and getting along with public transport by himself. He/she should be ok with working most of the time by himself and not permanent working within a group (the volunteer gets an intense enrollment and is accompanied by a strong team, what should make him become safe in doing his job more or less indpenently.The EVS volunteer should show mature behaviour, when he/she is working with and on the way with a person with disability by himself.
The EVS volunteer should allow relationship with the person with disability, but should also be able to set limits. He/she should have good manners, since he will present the work of IfS-Spagat also outside the headquarter (next to preparing stuff in the office: working at a families home, beeing on the way in public transports, using different public offers of activities and so on.).
Since we work with people with severe disabilities, it’s sometimes hard to get in contact with the handicaped person. Only speaking to a person is not always the best way to get in contact, but it’s at least one way to do it. So the EVS volunteer should be able to speak english and most important, he/she should be very motivated to learn german (advantageous is, if there would be basic knowledges of german).

specific selection:
The coordinating organisation is doing the first selection. After this the host organisation will do the final selection and final decision which volunteer they would like to host during these 12 month.