Last week’s Royal visit to Stockholm was a great success, I thought. Nicola and I were particularly pleased that Their Royal Highnesses were able to meet members of the British community, including some of those involved in volunteering, at our reception.
The Prince expressed particular interest in a project which is being started in Sweden – The English Volunteering Project.
The project has been started by a British woman called Claire Thomas, who, after moving to Sweden because of her husband’s work, realised that it was very difficult for people who don’t speak Swedish to find volunteering opportunities. She felt this was not a good thing as volunteering is an excellent way to help people become part of a new society, make friends, learn Swedish and gain work experience. So, as she has a background of working with the voluntary sector in the United Kingdom, she decided to use her experience to set up a project aimed at making it easier for people to volunteer here.
Sweden has a volunteering centre called Volontärbyrån which has been supporting and encouraging volunteering throughout Sweden for 10 years. However, its services are only offered in Swedish. Claire is working with them to make what they do accessible to anyone who can speak English.
The English Volunteering Project aims to
- Adapt Volontärbyrån’s existing services (matching volunteers with non-profit organisations) so that they can be accessed by anyone who can speak English.
- Work with and support Swedish non-profit organisations to make what volunteer opportunities they can accessible to non-Swedish speakers.
- Make English speakers aware of the value of volunteering, the volunteer opportunities that are available to them, and to encourage and support them to volunteer.
The idea of the project has been received very positively by the international community in Stockholm, and Prince Charles indeed commented that it is ‘obviously a brilliant idea’. However, the project needs to raise around 80,000 kronor to pay for the changes that need to be made to the existing Volontärbyrån website, and this needs to be raised before July, or Volontärbyrån will cancel the project. All other work on the project can be done on a voluntary basis, but this minimum amount of money is required for the project to continue.
Claire is keen to talk to anyone who may be able to help support the project, including companies who use English as a working language or who have lots of English speaking employees. Her contact details are claire.thomas@volontarbyran.org or 0708 38 15 73.
Tags: Royal Visit, The Prince of Wales, volunteering, Voluntärbyrån
Very good idea. However, SEK 80,000 is a fair amount of money for changes to a web site. Given that this type of work probably costs around SEK 800 an hour we are talking around 100 hours work, which seems rather a lot. Given the very diversified nature of modern Sweden, one might reasonably have expected their web site to have been bi-lingual from the beginning as they automatically excluding a rather large section of the community by only having it in Swedish. I also note from their website that they have been given three years of support from the government to increase their capabilities and establish collaborations. Couldn’t they use some of this money as a way to do that? Finally, I would say that their attidude of “raise the money by July or else we will cancel the project” wouldn’t exactly get me running for my cheque book if I was a potential donator.
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Wow…v.interesting.
i began my career in volunteering, and would love to be open to this project.
i hav
e lived as an invandra in north sweden, with life time of experiences,
nursing, teaching, rehabilitation and found it virtually impossible to find work.
now approaching retirement then please contact me.
i and family are renovating an old k-märkt hus but resources low, but would love to finish the painting – see webpage not finished again resources and advertising really close down potential here. My drean was to build a byggdegård as i think all people get saved in a cafe, more than a church….
anthony
my experience in rehab and research is in Klubhuset model philodophy
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