INVOLVE - Integration of migrants through volunteering

INVOLVE - Integration of migrants through volunteering

• Objectives
• Partners
• Main conclusions

Timeframe: 9th June 2005 - 9th December 2006

INVOLVE final report

For further information please refer to the INVOLVE project website www.involve-europe.eu.

Objectives:

The project aimed to address the lack of knowledge about migrant volunteering, attitude towards it, policies and actions that facilitate these activities. The project partners identified barriers to integration and the involvement of third country nationals in volunteering, good practice examples on how to overcome these barriers and made recommendations towards policy makers and practitioners in the field on how to better use the potential of volunteering in integration policies.

It was designed to nurture trans-European networking, thus achieving increased dialogue between stakeholders, identification, exchange and dissemination of knowledge and good practices, and development of recommendations for policy changes.

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Partners:

• European Volunteer Centre (CEV), Europe (project coordination);
• Community Partnership Consultants (CPC), the Netherlands;
• MOVISIE (formerly CIVIQ National Volunteer Centre), the Netherlands;
• MENEDÉK – Association for Migrants, Hungary; 
• Volunteering England, the UK;
• INBAS-Sozialforschung research institute, Germany;
• University of Vienna - Institute for Sociology, Austria;
• FUNDAR - Foundation for Solidarity and Volunteering, Valencia, Spain;
• Institute for Research and Information on Volunteering (IRIV), France;
• The Institute for Volunteering Research (IVR) in England was responsible for the external evaluation of the project.

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Main conclusions:

• Third country nationals are far from being a homogenous group – which makes it impossible to find solutions to integration that fits them all.
• Integration policies often target naturalised immigrants who have, because of naturalisation, ceased to be third country nationals. Reality proves to be too complex to fit into such clear-cut categories.
• It is impossible to identify good practice which fits all country contexts and which provides answers to the challenges identified.
• In spite of all the differences, volunteering has been found by all country partners to play a role as an indicator of integration, and one which contributes to several other indicators as it enables migrants to acquire basic knowledge of the host society, to participate in society through non-formal and informal education and to improve their employability on the labour market.
• Volunteering enables the host society to better deal with increasing diversity and to accommodate change, as well as being a means by which both immigrants and non-immigrants meet and take civic action on community issues that matter to both of them.
• Networking between migrant and mainstream organisations has been noted as a key component of success. And government at different levels should help create an enabling environment both for volunteering in general, and for migrants more specifically, to get involved in volunteering. The best initiatives start bottom-up, but need a framework in which to emerge.
• The institutions at the European level should ensure that volunteering is included as an instrument for, and an indicator of, integration in one of the next Handbooks on Integration of the EU and that special attention is attributed to volunteering in the implementation of the Common Basic Principles of Integration.

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   This project is financed by the European Commission in the framework of the INTI programme.