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The EU Council decided that 2011 will be designated the «European Year of Volunteering»

Nowadays, Alliance of the European Social Organizations starts its work on organization of the European Year of Volunteering events.

Announcement 2011 the Year of Volunteering in Europe — this is a reaction to the actions of European civil society, which proves the importance of volunteers for the individual regions, countries, nations and Europe as a whole. The other goal is to further develop and improve the environment for voluntary activity in Europe.

The EU is working on support for volunteering for many years, in 1996 the EU established the European Voluntary Service (EVS) to support youth participation in social life. The aim of EVS is to develop solidarity, mutual understanding and tolerance among young people, and support active citizenship of young people.

European Year of Volunteering aims to attract more people to volunteer work — making access to it easier, rewarding volunteers, improving the quality of volunteering, providing training and matching volunteers to suitable vacancies, raising awareness about the importance of volunteer work.

Volunteers actively help Belarusian Children's Hospice more than one year. People of different ages and different professions come to the hospice to help nurses with childcare, to help social workers in conducting activities to help in cleaning and many other cases in which volunteers are willing to participate. Today, among the volunteers, we have translators (translation of our website into other languages — it's their job), lawyers, managers, photographers, designers, videotape operators…

We are extremely grateful to them for the help they have provided to us! In fact, without volunteers staff would have much more work and they hardly ever could do this job with a desire, enthusiasm and creativity.

In recent years in our organization the employee engagement has appeared and began to develop. Such assistance we have provided by «Priorbank» and brewery «Olivaria» — staff of these companies came to our summer cottage and significantly helped in its accomplishment — a huge THANK THEM for that!

In 2010 we also received more than ever foreign volunteers — more than two dozen! Looks like we're turning into an international organization!

Also we tried to make relationships with volunteers on the basis of mutual respect and openness, if it were possible, tried to teach new people (in 2010 seven training sessions for volunteers were held).

We hope that the volunteers who helped us, not just enjoyed the cooperation but also gained invaluable life experience!