Universal volunteering
Aid organizations in Germany are increasingly seeking to recruit volunteers with international roots.
One in three people in Germany give up some of their free time to do unpaid voluntary work. Germany’s Federal President Joachim Gauck describes this as “unpaid engagement that is priceless”. After all, aid organizations and institutions need people who are willing to volunteer and work on behalf of society: as first-aiders at sporting events, as carers for old people, as relief workers following natural disasters in Germany or abroad, or as coaches for local football teams. As in almost all EU countries, however, migrants in Germany are under-represented in aid organizations despite accounting for a large and constantly growing part of the population. Experts believe that this is not necessarily because they have no interest in voluntary work; more often it is a question of cultural barriers or a lack of information. Aid organizations wish to address this deficit and bring about an intercultural opening of volunteer work.
They are being supported in this by the EU “Protect” project. Its goal is to give people of migrant origin access to new, non-formal types of education, while at the same time helping aid organizations to recruit new volunteers. At the beginning of 2013, the project’s first “ambassadors” received their training certificates in Berlin. These volunteers from the German Red Cross, the Malteser Hilfsdienst, the Technische Hilfswerk and the Voluntary Fire Brigade go into immigrant organizations, cultural institutions, communities and schools to promote the education and qualification opportunities offered by their aid organizations. An example from the south of Germany reveals the concrete form this can take: in the autumn of 2013, the Bavarian Red Cross in Nuremberg launched a free course for volunteer first-aiders aimed specifically at participants of Turkish origin.
International Volunteer Day on 5 December
www.engagiert-in-deutschland.de
www.deutscher-engagementpreis.de
