Project UpgradeU! is responding in wider context to the high unemployment of graduates in the labour market in EU and in more focused context on support of organisations working with youth, concretely with volunteers. Project will enable qualitative improvement of work with young volunteers through formulation and transfer of concept of long-term continuous work with the target group (educational programme using club-platform, mentoring and personal growth through volunteering activities) and creation of ICT tool for self-reflection of personal growth of the young volunteers. Project gives space for realization of educational activities through theoretical preparation (trainings), practical implementation (projects within the platform) and evaluation and self-reflection of individuals, which is a key skill while entering the labour market and presenting themselves as job candidate. Bilateral cooperation of the project partners will enable transfer of good praxies and buildig a base for future collaboration on the topic of recording and acknowledging of informal education on the labour market.

Transnational Youth Inititative idea was based on discussions and brainstorming with youth co-workign with Senfineco Association in Poland in city of Łódź. Youth expressed a need ofhaving regular meetings, workshops and volunteering activities, which in parrarel will not be obliging them to work in one certain place for one precise group. Few members of the groupare also former long-term volunteers within program EVS. After coming back from their experience they lost contact with their sending organisation and struggle with professional andsocial readapation to their previous environment. Project combines needs of two groups and take advantage of their backgrounds in order to promote volunteering as a developing activityfor professional and personal life. Objectives through which we wish to achieve this aim are:• Empowering volunteers and ex-international volunteers.• Introducing values and benefits of volunteering for youth without such experience• Enabling recognition and development of already acquired competenes for ex-international volunteers• Creating a functional space for networing and self-development of youth based on non-formal, peer-to-peer learning for ex-volunteers and youth without such experienceActivities we are proposing are tightly related to objectives. We wish youth to treat the created space as an incubator of ideas, creativity, moderated discussions and safe space for tryingthemselves in role of leader of workshops, organisers of events and researchers. We also wnat to provide a mentoring for former EVS volunteers, who will among peers with similarexperience try to readapt to their community and recognize their capacity collected during the interantional experience. On a local base we will also develop and output - a map withdescriptions of organisations in cities of Łódź and Ljubljana. Map will be a portfolio of activities for youth, which they can join according to their interest, time and preferences. Before themap development, youth will take interviews with selected organisations. Project includes two blended mobilities, which play a role of summary of particular phases, exchange ofexperiences and foregoing activities in both partner countries. During both mobilities youth from initiative groups will have a chance to lead workshops and share their outcomes from bothphases of the ongoing projects. In between, coordinators of the project will meet twice on transnational meetings and put together outcomes of the project, plan and standardize strategyand discover similarities and differences between the groups, fields and ngoworld in international context.

The unemployement rate of youth in Europe was in the time when this project was shaped very urgent issue. It was connected with the fact that the youth and youth workers struggled to understand and mainly present non-formal learning and volunteering as activities building soft skills which are important for labour market and labour market lacked awareness and acceptance of volunteering as source of competencies and experience of their young job candidates. Therefore the project “Youth Employability via Volunteering” was focusing on increasing employability of young people by raising acknowledgement of competences gained through volunteering. The project targeted young volunteers, youth workers and also representatives of labour market (mainly companies, but also labour offices) by following activities: - networking among all project stakeholders, - researching in-depth the current status of how the labour market perceives volunteering - results available at https://www.inexsda.cz/docs/volunteering-and-labour-market-research-youth-employability-via-volunteering.pdf- joint collaboration on upgrade of innovative competences tracking application IM-PROVE linking it with other existing tools such as Europass and Youthpass and their acknowledgement and usage by all three target groups (volunteers, youth workers and labour market) - available at improve.inexsda.cz and in App Store (iOS) and Play Store (Android)- capacitating youth workers to use such self-reflection/tracking tools as part of their daily work and providing them with easy to use e-handbook on how to do so - available at handbook.inexsda.czThe project was realised by INEX-SDA (Czech Republic) together with Zavod Voluntariat (Slovenia) and Solidarités Jeunesses (France), organisations, which work together more than a decade on various projects concerning volunteering, non-formal education, employability issues and global learning. The project was also envisaged to target interested stakeholders in respective countries (civil service, ministries, companies, youth organisations, other NGOs working with youth and volunteering…) whom we cooperated with and / or presented the results of the project and discussed about further cooperation.

<< Objectives >>The main goal of the project is to develop knowledge, skills and attitudes based on critical thinking, ethical communication, media literacy and intercultural awareness among young people. Thus, we will be committed to developing tools for acquiring such competencies and skills of youth, which will strive to break stereotypes about North-South relations, neo-colonialist principles of action, in accordance with global solidarity and intercultural understanding and respect for different cultures.<< Implementation >>Technical and content upgrade of the online platform E-tick. Following this, creation of handbook that will be a support tool for our e-course, equipping educators to ask the right questions and know how to lead discussion groups on E-tick themes. Based on this we will host E-tick clubs within which our e-course users will be able to meet regularly and discuss the content of our modules. We will also create a training manual for teachers and trainers based on e-course for in-person.<< Results >>- updated and upgraded existing online platform E-tick- support activities and tools for addressing platform topics (E-tick clubs)- ethical communication and global learning workshops for teachers- ethical communication and global learning workshops for coaches and camp leaders- manual for the implementation of support activities to address the topics of the platform and workshops of ethical communication and global learning for teachers, trainers and camp leaders

The ImProve your Impact project aims to contribute to measuring the impact and acknowledging the impact of volunteer / youth activities on youth capacity development. NGOs involved - Voluntariat Institute, Inex-SDA and Young Researchers of Serbia (YRS), through our regular work, strive for greater recognition of acquired competences and skills in non-formal learning through participation in various forms of youth work. This is an area we have been dealing with for many years and we have addressed them with previous projects. Through two Erasmus + projects, in partnership with Inex (which has partnered with an IT company, project partner, Inventi Labs as outsourcers), we have developed the online application IM-PROVE, which transforms tangible volunteer experiences into competencies and with the second one we have upgraded the web application to the basic mobile version, linking it to Youthpass, Europass and BadgeCraft training badges. This year we also carried out a Feasibility Visit, which also included YRS, and all three project NGO partners co-designed the project with the help of Inventi Labs via Skype and subsequently co-wrote it.All NGO project partners have also been involved in measuring impact in our organizations for years, but we still have not been able to find a single system that can be implemented for all different types of projects we carry out. Now we have discovered the additional potential of the IM-PROVE application, which will be substantially and technically upgraded and suitable for all three participating international volunteer networks (SCI, Alliance and CCIVS), as well as for a wider range of project-oriented volunteer and youth organizations, now also national level. The intellectual results of the project will be appropriate for national and international contexts, short and long term projects as well as for other activities. The project will greatly contribute to measuring and recognizing the effects of volunteering and youth activities on the development of youth competences.The objectives of the proposed project are:- Upgrade the IM-PROVE application to make it available in national and wider international context and increase the organization's profile by 30%- Increase the number of IMPROVE users for 60%- Make it possible to measure the impact of activities - Improve the recognition of competences among young people and raise awareness of the importance of active citizenship in their personal and professional development- Higher visibility of IMPROVE on national and international level Throughout the project, at least 120 participants will be involved. They will be involved in extending the activity profile within the application and identifying impact measurement filters (research), in pilot testing, multiplicative events and other dissemination activities. We will involve as wide range of stakeholders as possible with a focus on the following profiles: camp leaders, youth workers and volunteers working with young people, users of current applications, national and international stakeholders (local and national decision makers, educational institutions, businesses, volunteer networks, NGOs) , other societies and organizations).The planned activities reflect the desire for an innovative, quality product and are designed according to a tiered approach. The project will begin with an exploration of the impact measurement methods currently used by organizations. In parallel, the needs of potential stakeholders relating to the identification and interpretation of the effects of non-formal education on young people will be explored. The research will lead to the development of relevant content of the mobile application that meets the perceived desires and needs. This will create an app upgrade plan. This is related to the dissemination of the profiles of organizations using the application and the increase in the number of users, which will be given particular attention by project partners. The next activity is the preparation of a manual that will present tools and methods for self-reflection of the competences of young people and volunteers from various youth and volunteer activities. At the same time, it will represent the use of our application and will enable various organizations and individuals to properly use the application and make the best use of its functionality. The manual will greatly help to disseminate project results and promote the application itself. This brings us to multiplicative events where the promotion and further upgrading of the app are paramount. . The spectrum of stakeholders involved will be broader from event to event, as this will only enable us to build a strong core user group, which is crucial for the later integration of the application into everyday lives.