EVS – RUMUNIA
Project environment
Team for Youth Association, Str. Transilvaniei, nr. 8/17
430253 Baia Mare, Romania
E-mail: team4uth@gmail.com
Phone: 0040 262 21 41 21
Fax: 0040 262 21 41 21
Contact: Ms. Lacramioara Tabita Boier
Project environment
All volunteers will be hosted in Baia Mare, the capital city of the county Maramures. Baia
Mare is a medium sized city located in the north-western part of the country near the
Hungarian and Ukrainian borders. The city has a population of 150,000 inhabitants including
different ethnic and religious minorities: Romanians (82,85%), Roma (5,3%), Hungarians
(14,79%), Ukrainians (0,25%), Germans (0,35%), Jewish (0,04%).
The city was first noted in official documents in the year 1329 as a gold extraction centre.
Afterwards the city was fortified and still keeps the remaining of the old medieval
architecture. The city has a strong economical potential and, also a significant number of
touristic attractions.
Situated in a mountainous region and surrounded by famous peaks creating a unique
landscape, the small cities surrounding Baia Mare offer a great atmosphere for tourists,
especially foreigners. Maramures is also one of the most famous historical regions in
Romania, where traditions are still followed by the people living in rural areas in the same
way their ancestors used to do it. There are a lot of monuments and cultural attractions like:
the merry cemetery of Sapanta, the wooden gates and churches, folklore customs.
Despite the attractions it has to offer, the county is still struggling to promote its potential.
There are little investments in the promotion of tourism in Maramures at the moment and that
makes it difficult for people who live from agro-touristic activities to sustain their business.
There is a strong need for activities that strengthen the visibility of the area.
In the rural part of the county people are still living in closed communities, following the
traditions and with little opportunity to become aware of the multicultural environment in
Europe. For them, coming in contact with other nationalities will have a meaningful impact.
Also, T4UTH will encourage the youngsters from the area to go abroad as EVS volunteers.
The EVS volunteers hosted in this project will have the option to choose from a range of
activities that our organization implements regularly with the help of our team of volunteers.
The youngsters will be able to participate in the following projects:
Language Skills Clubs. The volunteers will provide free language classes for the locals. The
aim of the project is to provide free language activities for local people that cannot afford to
pay for tutoring lessons and to have local youngsters participating in non-formal education
classes regarding the culture and civilization of different countries. Not only will the
participants improve their language abilities, they will also get in contact with new cultures
and will have the option to learn foreign languages that are not usually taught in schools. The
volunteers will take the role of trainers for the language clubs and will use different education
methods. During the preparation weeks the young EVS participants will gain new training
skills and will become more aware of the importance of non-formal education.
Us. Them. Smile. The project will be implemented by local T4UTH volunteers together with
youngsters from other countries. The activity is developed in cooperation with schools for
children with disabilities and orphanages from Baia Mare. The volunteers will work together
with our youngsters in order to organize activities suitable for children of different ages and
with different needs. The children involved in the project are aged between 6 and 15 and have
different problems: mental health problems, disabilities, behaviour and communication
problems.
School workshops. Following the needs and interests of our EVS volunteers we will place
them in different projects in local primary schools. With the aim of giving a new design to
regular language, art, sports, science, music, geography and history classes the youngsters will
take part in daily lessons coming with their own ideas for exercises and activities. This
particular project will challenge the teaching skills of each of the participants and will help
them gain new communication and creativity competences.
Cultural life for the community. One of the main aims of our organization is to bring different
cultural activities closer to the young public in the region. Therefore we organized cultural
clubs in different cities from the north-western part of the county. Our local volunteers in the
clubs organize independent projects coordinated by the headquarter team from Baia Mare.
The EVS volunteers will form team and will travel to take part in different projects organized
by our clubs. The range of cultural project will include: modern and post-modern literature
festivals, street and pub theatre, libraries for the rural communities, photo and painting
exhibitions, and poetry debates. What is more, the volunteers will also participate in the
writing and editing of our magazine and cultural website. Their contribution can be: books,
movies, theatre reviews; helping in the design of the magazine, promoting it and distributing
it for free in schools, high schools and universities.
The aforementioned activities will help the volunteer gain the following competences:
- how to find ideas for and how to organize youth and cultural projects
- how to use their creativity in projects with and for children
- they will improve their social, communication and intercultural awareness
- how to work with disabled children
- how to better understand and how to teach their mother tongue
- how to work in international teams
- they will become more aware of contemporary art and cultural events
The volunteers will choose a project that better suits their needs and skills. There is an option
for them to be included in more than one project if the environment of each activity allows it.
One of the important characteristics of the project consists of the fact that each volunteer will
be challenged to organize his/her own schedule according to the activities chosen. This will
help them gain time management skills.
The first two weeks that the volunteers will spend in their project will be organized as
preparation for the project. The volunteers will get the first pieces of advice from our staff and
from our volunteers. They will get to know the environment of their project; will experience
for the first time their tasks, will get orientated in the area with the help of our volunteers and
will find out about the customs of the hosting community. They will get acquainted with their
mentor, coordinator, and language teacher. According to the project they choose, each
volunteer will receive special task related tutoring.
The volunteer will work 6 hours every day and have 2 days every week free. Also, the
youngsters will have a monthly holiday of 2 days. The Romanian lessons will be taught by a
professional teacher and will be organized twice a week for one and a half hours.
For the recruitment process T4UTH will work closely with the partner organizations ensuring
that the project is visible and promoted in the groups of possible beneficiaries from all the
participant countries. We will host volunteers aged between 16 and 30 and will include them
in the projects according to their needs and competences. Firstly, the volunteers hosted in our
projects should show an open minded attitude towards different groups of people as they will
work with a lot of categories of beneficiaries. Also, they should be flexible with the activities
they take part in and willing to integrate and socialize, as they will mainly develop activities
in international groups. Moreover, we will focus on helping the volunteers become aware of
the obstacles they might face and we will encourage them to be open about their problems and
different difficulties that they will face within the period of time spent as EVS volunteers. The
interests and needs of the volunteers may vary. There will be no special requirements; the
portrait of the volunteer mentioned above is helpful for orientation but not a strict
requirement.
In order to organize a recruitment process accessible for all potential candidates we will
cooperate with our partner organization for emphasizing on the promotion of the available
places in the project. We will concentrate on making the selection process transparent and
visible. All information about the project will be disseminated with the help of Eurodesk
platform. Also, on a regional level we will organize presentations in schools and cultural
institutions for promoting the EVS projects we implement.
In the projects Language Skills Clubs and School Workshops we are able to host maximum 6
volunteers at once. The volunteers will live in the city, in rented flats. They will have all
utilities and devices used for cooking and house holding. Also, we will provide a mentor in
each school included in the project and for those hosted in Language Skills Clubs we will
provide a mentor from our organization.
In the project Us. Them. Smile. we are able to host 3 volunteers for more than 2 months, and
group of maximum 4 volunteers for less than 2 months.
In the project Cultural Life for the Community we can host maximum 3 volunteers for long
term at once.
We will not host more than 4 volunteers with special needs at once. The groups will live
together with a host family. In order to ensure the quality of the project, we will emphasize on
providing special support and reinforced mentorship for the group. We can provide a
specialist to interact with them using creative and artistic therapeutic methods. The
coordinator and the mentor of the group will arrange for constant meetings with the group
having as a main objective to help them understand the learning process they entered once
they decided to become EVS volunteers. In their activities they will be closely guided by our
staff and local volunteers.
We will pay special care to supervising the volunteers properly. All the participants will be
hosted in a flat in Baia Mare and will be able to contact their mentor in real time. The flats
will be situated in areas with little or no criminality. For any critical situation all volunteers
will get a list with the emergency phone numbers and the contact details of our staff. Also, to
provide an option for the free time the volunteers will have to spend during their project our
organization will provide a monthly schedule of activities developed together with our local
team of volunteers.
We will prevent risks and crisis by:
guiding the volunteers before and during their project
helping with the integration of the volunteer by encouraging multicultural activities that
involve local youth
providing a local volunteer as a tutor for each of the participants in the project
ensuring medical care when needed and providing a translator for those who need it
providing necessary information about the rights and duties of the volunteer in the first two
weeks of preparation
providing a map of the city for each volunteer with highlighted points for the police station,
hospitals, banks, exchange offices
Motivation and EVS experience
Team for Youth Association (T4UTH) acts like a volunteering centre on a regional level.
Therefore, we have significant experience in coordinating and educating groups of volunteers
with the aim of promoting civic work as one main opportunity for youngsters to develop new
abilities.
Having in our own team former EVS volunteers we are aware of the significant impact that an
international volunteering stage abroad has on the life of the society and, mainly, on the
personal and professional development of the participant. We would like to use the our work
as a hosting organization for EVS in order to offer youngsters from other countries to
experience a stay in an international environment in order to develop a sense of European
citizenship and belonging to a multicultural community. On the other hand, this will be an
opportunity for the local youth to work together with foreigners.
Moreover, we aim at sending youngsters from our area abroad in order to broaden their views
and to show them different alternatives they have as being part of the European community.
Description of the organisation
TEAM FOR YOUTH ASSOCIATION is a cultural youth association, non-governmental and
non-conformist that develops cultural projects on a regional and European level. The
organization uses as a main resource the abilities and competencies of its group of young
volunteers. As a general aim we try to stimulate cultural initiatives through volunteering and
to participate to social transformation by activating young people civically and culturally.
We consider volunteering to be an opportunity for youngsters to learn actively, to develop
new skills, to work in international groups, and to make a difference for the society.
Our organization aims at implementing projects like:
- Youth exchanges
- Trainings and seminars
- Cultural workshops and debates
- European Voluntary Service
- Street Theatre and Performing art activities
- Art Exhibition and events
- Social campaigns