Volunteering within the EU Aid Volunteers initiative
Published: Dec 4, 2015 Reading time: 2 minutes
Have you ever considered a possibility to go abroad and would like to dedicate your time to helping people in need in a humanitarian context? Maybe the European initiative EU Aid Volunteers is exactly what you are looking for!
The EU Aid Volunteers initiative provides European volunteers with the opportunity to join humanitarian aid efforts around the world outside of the European Union.
The EU Aid Volunteers initiative is open to a variety of profiles (from newcomers to experienced humanitarian experts). The minimum age for volunteers is 18 and there is no upper limit.
Starting in the year of 2016, trained and well-prepared volunteers will be deployed in humanitarian projects worldwide. People in Need will most likely send out first volunteers on international missions (to, for example, Angola, Turkey or Cambodia) in mid-2016.
Profiles of individual volunteers will be dependent upon a prior needs assessment of a hosting organization (in the case of People in Need, the needs of the missions abroad will be considered) and upon the context of deployment.
Each posted vacancy will include a detailed description of activities to be performed during the deployment. These activities involve anything related to the fields of organization development, capacity building, project management, disaster risk management or to the fields of food and nutrition, water and sanitation, etc., especially in the sector of humanitarian aid.
All volunteers will participate in an initial training during which each candidate will be assessed in relation to their readiness for deployment. As a part of the deployment preparation process, each volunteer will have a chance to spend up to 3 months in the People in Need’s HQ before the deployment, in order to get acquainted with the basics of humanitarian work.
Once the EU Aid Volunteers initiative will officially commence, all vacancies will be published on the European Commission's Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection department (ECHO) website. All announcements for EU AID Volunteers’ placements in People in need can be found here in the listing of all jobs and vacancies.
Would you like to learn more about volunteering?
