Project environment

In the Kolping house Mistelbach there are 4 live communities. In one of them, there live very strong handicapped adults. This live community get a special medical care and social welfare.
In the other three communities there are handicapped persons, who are able to do a lot of things alone. For example take a shower, cleaning the tooth, playing games, go for shopping or other outdoor activities,…
These persons are also working in the workshop (work studio) and they also have the possiblity to organise some sparetime activites like different games, reading lessons,….
The workstudio is open from Monday to Friday from 08:00 - 15:00.
The people in the workstudio work in different working groups for example: a housgroup (responsible for the houswork like cooking, cleaning,..), a gardengroup (responsible for the work in the garden like gardening, vegetabel market,…), a carpenter group to create a lot of different workpieces.
Local community:
The house is situated in Mistelbach in Lower Austria. This city is very close to the czech border.
Mistelbach is about 110 kilometers form St. Pölten (the capital of Lower Austria) and about 50 kilometers from Vienna. Mistelbach is a small city and has a population of 70.000 people.
The Kolping house Mistelbach is situated in the city center. There are a lot of shops, bars and restaurants, schools and other organisations.

Tasks

European integration has become more and more important for all. The most of our inhabitants haven´t the possibilty to go abroad and to meet different people from different backgrounds and culutres.
With the placement of European volunteers in our association, we want to achieve the following aims:
" Our live communities should develop a common understanding with people from other countries
" The inhabitants should learn on what the European Integration goes through
" They should learn to understand, that they are a part of the European Union
" They should learn more about different countries, cultures and customs.
Volunteer tasks:
The volunteer (he or she) should be involved in the daily work. He/she should support our team, talk with the inhabitants, care for them, listen to them, help them by their daily activities. The volunteer cook with the handicapped persons (for example traditional meals from the home country) The volunteer also has the possibility to plan and organise own projects for example reading lessons, football games or other activities.
The volunteer should have some different tasks, like:
" To talk and support the inhabitants
" To take care for them (support them by their daily works like houseworks,…)
" To assist the statt members by their daily work
" Beeing available for questions and problems
" Inform the inhabitants about the own country (tadtions, culutre, tadtional meals, music, customs,…)
In addtion the volunteer should be open minded, because he or she has a lot of face to face contact with our inhabitants and with our team. So the volunteer will hear a lot of problems, will a see a lot of different situations.
The volunteer should enrich our daily work with her/his inputs concerning her/his home country.
Moreover the volunteer should organise projects and activities about traditional and typical things of his/her home country - like music, games, culture and art, food, literature, customs and festivals, sports, general information about country and people, a little bit language and so on.
Together with our team the volunteer will prepare different methods, how the namend topics will be presented. This could be prestations, project work, games, exhibitions and so on. Learning by doing and having fun with new topics are main objectives in our work.
The volunteer will be responsible for his/her projects, but guided and supported by the staff.
A typical day:
07:00 - 07:30 Breakfast
08:00 -10:00 Free time for the volunteer (language course)
10:00 - 12:00
12:00 - 13:00 Lunch
13:00 - 21:30 Work with inhabitants (outdoor activities, care form them, help them with their house work, prepare the supper,…)
The volunteer should be involved in our team meetings and in our administrative work.
Percentage of time given to each task:
12% Teammeeting
15% administrative work
73% Work with our inhabitants (care for them, talk and listen to them,…)
The volunteer will have two free days per week and he or she will work 30 hours per week in our organisation.
Possible holidays are the school vacancies, these are two weeks around Christmas, one week between January and February, 2 weeks Easter holidays and the whole july and august. The volunteer will have 12 days (6 months) and 24 days (12 months) in his/ her disposal.

Target group

At the moment the organisation cares for 39 disapled people between 18 and 58 years. Our inhabitants are mentally (kognitive) and physically handicapped persons and so they need different kind of care.
In respect of the general recruitment criteria, we wish to have volunteers who would have fun working with disapled people and who are open minded. Our volunteer should be very interested in music, culture and sports.
Moreover we wish to have volunteers with a strong personality and the volunteers should be able to dealing with problems and to handle difficult situations.
Our team (social workers) will spend as much time with the volunteer as necessary. We will discuss this with the volunteer and the sending organisations before starting the project.