EVS (European Voluntary Service) mentors answering the vital question ‘How can EVS volunteers deal with their emotions?
Within the scope of Volunteering Goes Europe, Culture Goes Europe – Soziokulturelle Initiative Erfurt e.V. and Center for Children, Youth and Family held a nine-day training full of workshops that focused on emotional, language, social and cultural, cognitive competences.
In order to help EVS volunteers deal with their emotions in a more creative and effective way, Training Course “EvsMOTIONS” was held in “Youth Meeting and Education Centre” Sajan, Serbia from 15th till 24th of July 2016.
Staff members (mentors/tutors/facilitators) from involved organizations who are directly working with the EVS volunteers participated in the training. They were provided with necessary skills and knowledge about how to give support to EVS volunteers in a context of emotional management and stress relief. They were introduced and practiced emotional management in context of developing learning to learn competence throughout the whole training.
The activities were based on experiential learning and on the principles of Non-Formal Education. The working methods used were individual presentations of participants, working groups, artherapy exercises, meditation, guided visualizations, techniques for empathic and emotional communication and active listening on the part of mentors, sessions on helping relationship but also on Erasmus + Programm, Youthpass and emotional competence exercises. Vele Georgiev, EVS project manager of CGE Erfurt e.V, says “This training is vital because out of various experiences we know that EVS mentors are not prepared to have creative response for the volunteers´ conflicts and don’t know how to handle intensive feelings, but also how to handle their own emotional reactions. Not being able to cope with that is influencing the overall result of the EVS project and the relations between the volunteer and the mentor”.
To learn more about Volunteering Goes Europe, visit http://www.cge-erfurt.org/?p=4143.
