ESC: Working in the social arena, supporting people with special needs

Lava Legato has been involved in EVS/ESC since 2001. The organization has been active in hosting, sending and coordinating EVS/ESC projects. On average at one time, 14 volunteers are in the Netherlands on a permanent basis each 8/9 months, supporting a wide variety of organizations; Lava Legato is either coordinating partner for volunteer projects at biodynamic farm Urtica de Vijfsprong in Vorden or is host for volunteer projects in the Rotterdam and The Hague area. Volunteer work, local but also international, for instance via ESC, is a main topic for the foundation. Aims for the applicant is to continuously improve, refine and further develop the quality of volunteer work. Lava Legato considers volunteer work as an essential tool for a) integration in society and social engagement (from the viewpoint of the individual volunteer); b) further developing the social domain by organizing activities for which financial resources are not available (from the viewpoint of the organization that makes use of the participant); c) developing work related competencies and skills related to active citizenship (from the viewpoint of the participant); d) enable social dialogue between parties that maybe will not meet under other circumstances (from the viewpoint of all stakeholders involved).
These areas can be considered as long term aims that Lava Legato hopes to achieve.
The short term aims are related to the long-term aims, but focus on the individual level: they focus on the individual volunteers and local partners that are involved in Lava Legato projects. They are more concrete than the long term aims.
The short term aims related to the participants are linked to their learning objectives and can be described as: supporting volunteers to reach their learning objectives that they formulate themselves at the start of the project with the aid of Lava Legato. With the start of each new group of volunteers, Lava Legato as well as the board of the foundation, formulates new learning objectives for the organization itself. At the end of a volunteer period for a group, Lava Legato evaluates and formulates new strategies and actions that aim to improve the activities and services. A
concrete example is the introduction recently of the company Swapfiets that provides good quality bikes and excellent services in case of repair or loss. In 2019 Lava Legato also initiated a strategic partnership that was granted. The aim for this partnership is to improve the quality of sending/hosting/coordinating in every process/aspect/aim of the ESC program.
Lava Legato provides activities regarding to entrepreneurship because of the strong believes that the specific provided activities can be a
strong base for young people looking for extra work skills in the social domain and the ones that are interested in starting
their own busines with different social elements as key aspect.

Specific future aims for Lava Legato are to promote ESC in the Caribean overseas Dutch (BES)/French islands, expand our network within the overall Caribean area with Dutch and French partners and start hosting/sending activities with Caribean partners. Also with these activities Lava Legato would like to focus on special needs/less privileged youth in particular. The granted project BES to the max 2020 is already a first step to reach for these aims.