The European Volunteering Forum was organised by SALTO SEE, SALTO EuroMed, SALTO EECA and the National Agencies of Slovenia and  Turkey and was attended by 54 participants from Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Georgia, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Kosovo, Lebanon, Moldova, Morocco, Palestine, Portugal, Russia, Serbia, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey and Ukraine.

Together we discussed benefits and challenges of long-term transnational volunteering, learned from different examples of practice in the field, defined future perspectives, networked with other participants across Europe and beyond and celebrated 20 years of the European Voluntary Service. During these 20 years, around 100,000 young volunteers have offered their service within an EVS project to an organisation in another country, supported by sending and receiving organisations in diverse social and cultural environments.

Different themes and topics were covered during the Forum, but most importantly we were able to further explore various transnational volunteering programmes and schemes,  during the Volunteering Library through ‘one to one’ conversations with different stakeholders involved in these programmes. Apart from Wings of Hope, the other proposed topics were current EVS volunteers, Global Education Network of Young Europeans (GLEN), SALTO Resource Centres, National Agency, Youth Association DRONI and Chabibeh Sporting Club.

We were also able to discuss what needs to be changed to achieve better volunteering programmes, schemes and projects with a focus on a series of themes, such as learning/competence building, follow-up of volunteering projects, participation (community engagement), inclusion, solidarity, cultural impact (change), employability/entrepreneurship, visibility, recognition, among others.