Volunteering Equality Rights Action
VERA

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General Objective: Making volunteering more inclusive and representative of society as a whole.

 

Specific objectives:

• Enable volunteers and staff of volunteer-involving and volunteer infrastructure organisations, and local authorities, to engage in mutual learning and exchange good practices on the role of volunteering as active citizen engagement and an expression of democracy and European values that involves the full diversity of genders and other discriminating factors and contributes to meaningful local volunteering strategies including those that seek to integrate and support Ukrainian refugees.

• To increase the capacities of the applicant & partner organisations to give support to the provision of, and/or directly provide, inclusive volunteering opportunities involving the full diversity of genders and other discriminating factors and create favourable conditions for advancing gender equality and tackling multiple and intersecting discrimination, including through the gathering of volunteering data to inform policy change to enable more equality in volunteering.

• To give visibility to and raise awareness about the provisions and support for civil society, volunteering and volunteers involving the full diversity of genders and other discriminating factors that are enabled under different EU policies such as the European Democracy Action Plan and programmes such as CERV, the “Next Generation EU” funds, European Solidarity Corps, Erasmus Plus and other EU funding and policy frameworks that support volunteering & citizen engagement to build resilience and contribute to the recovery process in a manner based on rights and values.