Description
Project goal is to involve excluded people in volunteering activities in order to make them actively participate in social life. The excluded will work side by side with the volunteers from business volunteering schemes and with student volunteers. Project participants will collect food from producers, wholesalers and farmers. Food will be collected on Bronisze Food Market and on the farms. Volunteers will support the foundation by doing some warehousing work, transporting the food, and doing food collections during campaign drives. Marginalized individuals at risk of exclusion will co-decide about the way project activities will be organized. They will take part in the work of the Coordination Group. 240 volunteers will be involved, of which 120 people will be recruited from among the excluded. Everyone will be trained. Project site: foundation headquarters located in Reguły near Warsaw.
Summary of project results
Being an excluded person it is difficult to get back to active life in the society. Such people usually struggle with personal problems (substance abuse, psychological and emotional problems) and are unwilling to make efforts in order to get out of crisis. Supplying food is one of the forms of reaching these people, therefore European programs oblige the organizations, that carry out the process of food distribution among the most deprived persons, to cover social inclusion activities as well. The objective of the project was to counteract social exclusion by involving excluded persons in volunteering for the benefit of other people in need and to give them the opportunity to cooperate with people from various communities. The project has helped volunteers to strengthen their social skills, necessary to start and maintain close interpersonal relations, openness to others, self-acceptance and belief in the possibility to change their life situation, which can be considered as the first step in that direction. A group of 14 volunteers expressed the will to continue their cooperation with the organization. Events organized included 2 training courses on the rules of food collection campaigns (26 participants), 2 training courses on the principles of work with food items, on work health and safety and the use of office equipment (18 participants), one training course on the shaping one's own image and one within operating forklifts (4 people). Volunteers were taught every day work in the organization: sorting of food in the storage facility and helping in office tasks (2-3 persons per day) and participated in 5 harvests of fruit and vegetables on farms (58 volunteers), in 23 food collections on the Agricultural and Food Wholesale Market “Bronisze" (49 volunteers) and during Easter food collections in supermarkets (32 volunteers). Both, in the storage facility and during the campaign, they worked together with the employees of the companies signed up within corporate volunteering program (217 people). 207 people in total who are at risk of exclusion - clients of 5 organizations- benefited from the project activities.
Summary of bilateral results