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VolunTECH: multiplier event, come discover digital volunteering!
On 21 September we opened our doors to introduce VolunTECH and its platform. It wasn’t the usual presentation with slides and polite applause: it was a day of real discussion, with PAG members, some participants and local volunteering groups.
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But let’s take a step back: what is digital volunteering?
Simply put: it’s volunteering done online, without needing to be physically present in a place. A volunteer can translate documents, manage an association’s social media, teach a language lesson, help someone navigate a website, provide administrative or creative support to an organization, all from home, with their own computer, on their own schedule.
It’s not “second-class volunteering” compared to in-person volunteering: it’s a different way of putting it into practice, one that opens doors that traditional volunteering sometimes can’t open. It allows those with little time, those who live far from a city, those with mobility limitations, or simply those who can’t travel every week, to still contribute to a cause. And it allows associations to find skills they may not have locally, but that can come from a volunteer hundreds of kilometers away or in another European country.
This is exactly the ground VolunTECH works on, and it’s what we shared during the day of 21 September.
The idea was simple: show how the platform works and, above all, how to register an organisation or a volunteer. Nothing theoretical: a hands-on path, step by step, because a tool is useful only if you really know how to use it. We also took a look at the opportunities linked to Erasmus+, to frame everything in a broader context.
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But the moment that stayed with me most came later, during the open discussion.
Some representatives of the associations present explained, in their own words, what really changes for an organization when it steps into digital volunteering. And what emerged are the things that, from those who work on projects, you rarely hear said with such clarity.
The first: no more the problem of finding spaces or getting materials. Anyone running a small association knows it well: it’s never trivial to find a suitable room or an extra computer for every volunteer who shows up.
The second: you can train without burning precious resources. Training volunteers takes time, and time, for a small organization, is the scarcest thing there is. The digital model lightens this burden too.
What are we talking about, when we talk about VolunTECH?
VolunTECH is the European project, co-funded by Erasmus+ (KA220-YOU), that we are carrying forward to make youth volunteering more digital and more accessible. We work on several fronts: training and certification of skills, a toolkit of resources for organizations, and the matching platform that was at the heart of the day on 21 September and that connects volunteers and organizations across Europe, including those who would normally face geographic or economic barriers.
This event is not an end point, it is the start of the most concrete part of the project in our area: the one in which the platform stops being “the project” and becomes a tool that associations actually use. And the words we gathered during the discussion tell us that we are heading in the right direction.
If you want to discover the platform and understand how to register your organization or start a digital volunteering journey, you can find everything at www.voluntechproject.eu.