ESC: A discovery of nature and adventure by guiding outdoor sports

VZW Het Moerashuis is a non-profit organisation located in Oudenaarde, in the Flemisch Ardennes in Belgium. Moerashuis vzw is a center where young people can go on holiday. We can host 72 different people in one center and 24 in another. In addition we also organize a number of leisure, outdoor and cultural activities such as canoeing, via ferrata, climbing, waterski, wakeboarding, laser battle, visits to archeological sites and weaving museum, survival workshops, etc. All the activities are focused on increasing the feeling of personal and social responsibility, sustainable environmental education and helping the development of life leading skills. Our organization gives the possibility to discover and develop your hidden resources through real adventures and challenges. We want the volunteers to learn more about our work in tourism and outdoor. We want them to get a good attitude in work and social life. We are willing to teach them every detail of our skills and technical know-how. We want to teach them the security rules and all about Belgium and European regulations in the outdoors. We also want to find out how they would organize it. During the project the volunteers will do many different things. The main task will be to accompany and guide adults, youngsters and children during outdoor sports activities. In this function they will guide people on ropes courses, during water activities and others, on the one hand they will learn to persevere but on the other hand they will also be able to build up a broad knowledge about how to deal with people. During guiding there will be many different people, young children who are afraid of heights but at the same time also older people who already have a lot of life experience. A first major objective within this project is that the volunteers learn a lot about how to deal with people, about intercultural differences in society and about themselves. In addition, almost all of our outdoor activities take place in nature. Nature management, nature education and caring for nature are therefore highly valued within our operation. Volunteers will also have a major contribution to make in this respect, because together we make sure that our forests stay clean, we build new paths or activities in such a way that our outdoor sports activities can continue in a good setting. Another major objective is the development of organisational competencies. By organising youth camps and sports days the volunteers learn how to plan and how to communicate with colleagues. A good time management is necessary to organize a good camp. We also want to show people from other countries how we work in our youth centre and how we organise things. We want to show how we organize outdoor sports activities and other cultural activities. In this way we aim to exchange experiences and discover how volunteers have done such things in their past. In this way we want to be doubly reinforcing, reinforcing for the organisation and reinforcing for the volunteers. In addition of this we want to find out how youth organisations work in other countries. Finally we have a number of concrete extra objectives for this project: - We want to equip youth volunteers with skills and competencies for organizing outdoor experiental learning activities with youngster in their communities. - we want to empower the youth volunteers who themselfves face obstacles in their personal and professional lives - We want to raise their knowledge about Erasmus+ programs and the opportunities it provides for them, for the organisations (guest- and partner), and for the people they work with. We've worked already a few years with European volunteers and we noticed that this was always a true lifetime experience for them. Not only have they learned how we work and organise our Moerashuis. They also got the chance to get involved in the management part of this organisation and to participate in several staff meetings. They also learned Dutch and travelled around Belgium to discover the history and culture. And all this together makes it an unforgettable experience. We are glad and proud to say that we can offer these chances with the help of Europe. Also, we discovered some new ideas and techniques thanks to them. A lot of them brought a new dynamism and a great atmosphere in our organisation. A lot of our guests were pleased to meet the European boys and girls and this gave an extra dimension to their visit at our place. Teachers experienced how their students started to talk English and were interested in their story. As the volunteers work together in team, they have to take initiative and work on creative ideas. They also get responsabilities and have to be aware of the importance of their duty. Good communication is also an important aspect of the teamwork. All that brings in responsability, entrepreneurship,...