Hosting a UK project
At Concordia, we’ve been hosting international volunteer projects since 1993. The first was for the Countryside Service of Brighton and involved seasonal conservation work in the beautiful South Downs. Since then the programme has gone from strength to strength and now we run over 20 projects each year including conservation work, supporting children’s play schemes and summer camps, helping to run festivals and working with adults with learning difficulties.
A little effort, so many benefits.
International volunteers are a hugely enthusiastic resource, raring to get working for you and the community! And most projects run for between two and four weeks, so they can accomplish much more than you could in a few days or a weekend.
What’s more…
- A project is often a good story for local media.
- Hosting an international group can help to broaden the horizons of local people – it may even prompt them to do a volunteer project themselves.
- Meeting a diverse international group of helpful young people can help to break down cultural stereotypes and promote international understanding.
- Hosting international volunteers gives communities an insight into other cultures.
“Apart from the benefit of us getting practical work done, the local community benefit by being reminded of how nice their locality is and the material benefits of being able to negotiate previously difficult paths, one member of the public I was talking to on the Friday afternoon commented on how she had noticed that the woods were a lot nicer to take runs in over the last 3 years. Some locals had been asking for a number of years for certain things to be fixed and the large body of volunteers that running a project can provide means we can hit an area and really make a difference, getting larger jobs done that would be very hard with just a couple of people”
Sam Talbot, Castle Morpeth Borough Council – host of 3 Concordia Projects