ESC: Volunteering project in Jönköping Municipality (2025-2026)

The Department Culture and Leisure in Jönköping offers services to a young population of children between 0-12 years and youth between 13-25 years. The recreational centres are 9 that are spread around the municipality where youth leaders organise various types of activites available for free. The municipality also offers a variety of public sport facilities such as indoor/outdoor pools, football arenas, ice skating rinks, and much more. The municipality has previous experience of welcoming volontarees through the previous program EVS. The department of Culture and Leisure activities used to receive youth-exchanges into its organisation until around 2013. The department is very interested to welcome volonteers again into its organisation as they always contributed to an added-value to the range of activities offered. The International Strategist from the municipality approached the department in order to introduce the idea to start up the volonteerings activities as a host organisation through the European Solidarity Corps. The aim this time is to try to structure the activities in order to create a more systematic work with the volonteers within the department. Many of the youth centres are located in areas that have different socio-economic status and challenges. Therefore, the goal is to focus on three dimensions; social, cultural and recreational which are the core of the work in the youth centres and their activities. These dimensions must be in focus in order to make sure that the social-environment at every youth facility gets improved. In addition, we also want to make sure that activities taken by the youth-leaders are in collaboration with the youth and will involve civil society in order for every youth centre to be inclusive, accessible and cultural. The activities that will be planned at the youth centres should aim to improve knowledge of social issues and to create a stronger community feeling. The youth is usually full of ideas and creativity with a lot of energy and engaged in different types of societal issues. A project that was run in the spring 2019 and that created a lot of interest among youth and the youth centres and staff was “Dags för EU-tjafs”. Dags för EU-tjafs was a project devoted to inprove the participation of first time voters to the last EU election in May 2019. It was arranged to create a forum where the youth could gain more knowledge of EU and to give first time voters the possibility to discuss and debate their views and encourage them to vote to the parliamentary elections on May 2019. Civil society also plays an important role as they are a cooperation partner to the youth centres. The close cooperation with civil society contributes to strengthen the community and the youth centres. This is an ongoing process with a long tradition in the Swedish society which is always taken into consideration. The ambition is to further develop this relationship in order to create more inclusive processes. This is also in line with the municipality goals for the future to be nominated for the Outdoor life 2020 award, and be Europe's Culture City 2029 and Småland’s leading centre on culture.