Our learning partnership, “Strategies for voluntary work in Europe”, has brought together Jewish and inter-religious organizations from the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Hungary, the Netherlands, Portugal and Czech Republic to exchange ideas about subjects of common interest and to develop new perspectives in their work.
Participants are lay leaders, managers and learners. All are multipliers: the people who have travelled to attend meetings are not the only ones to benefit; since they have responsibility for the project in their own organizations, they have been able to take their experiences and new knowledge “back home”, sharing it with other members of their organizations and thereby “multiplying” both the experience and knowledge and also the project itself so that their local community and many more people benefit as well.
All participating organizations aim to strengthen their work in adult education through the involvement of volunteers and are constantly searching for new ways of involving, motivating, integrating and training these volunteers.
This learning partnership aims therefore to develop new approaches, strategies and plans of action to strengthen the involvement and motivation of volunteers through exchange, best practice projects and lay leadership training.
The second major topic of this partnership has been to learn about Jewish heritage, Jewish realities and Jewish perspectives in Europe today – focusing on the different situations in the participating countries, addressing needs, challenges and threats, developing possible plans of action and cooperating with participants from different backgrounds. In this context the partnership organizations have also explored the subjects of anti-Semitism, immigration and integration.
In order to reach these objectives we organized several face-to-face meetings and some intensive exchange via the Internet. As a result we have developed this website as well as a brochure to summarize the outcomes of the partnership and to disseminate the results.
