ESC: Volunteering in insertion of unaccompanied minors

Diapason is a no-profit organisation, founded in 1985 and made of a group of 100 members. Our mission: by working together, bring in and on human and professional energies aimed at producing a positive change in the life conditions of children and their families when these are at risk due to cultural or economic reasons. Being co-responsible members is our main concern; every member shares parts of the different project-tasks while building and developing new projects; our organisation is focussed on taking care: to carry out a consistent educational and work approach towards our users and among ourselves is the core of our social action. For us, being members means to feel like making the dream of a property-shared social enterprise come true, which will enable all those who work with us to generate and spread a style based on the sharing of both material and non-material resources. For us, being members means to participate in building an individual needs-based enterprise, to participate in building an enterprise that is trying to be single’s needs-oriented; where the search for sharing with the others allows a strong job commitment; where individual tasks allow to work for just one organization; where thinking is recognised as an important part of the job; where possibilities and skills are offered and exchanged without necessarily asking the Market for them; where flexibility allows working mothers to go back to their jobs when their leave is over, where job positions’ changes can be positively accepted, experimenting positive actions to protect the individual life quality. Values that inspire our actions are bound to social inclusion and territorial cohesion towards the community welfare. For example, our daily interventions with young people we take care of in our services aim at obtaining the right of an active citizenship. This is especially true for the projects that involve recently migrated foreign children or deeply deprived families. The development of solidarity, tolerance and mutual understanding are the goals we have been always pursuing as far as the local community is concerned, in order to avoid the creation of ghettos and to develop common social rehabilitation projects. For the project making and the running of the above-mentioned actions, we collaborate and integrate with the local Social Services, with agencies and institutions, with schools and with the other subjects of the so-called “social-private” area (co-operatives and associations contracted to run public services). We are committed to supporting and promoting the opportunities that foster this integration, respecting the different institutional commitments and commissions, with the aim of creating services with a “social-capital” point of view (stressing on the local, on the creation of social visions and on the activation of everybody’s responsibility). To develop and orientate these actions, we take every opportunity to participate in the planning and building of social policies, by constantly interacting with local government agencies, cooperatives, unions; we also work in order to spread, among insiders, but also in the community at large, the necessary understanding of our weak subjects-oriented social intervention. To evaluate and to keep track of the results of our actions, we constantly pay attention to the people who benefit from our work, to the groups, and to the community we operate in. We have implemented an accurate monitoring and evaluation system through the collection and analysis of the results and perceptions from the different people involved (we are ISO 9001 certified) in our work.