What are work camps?

Work camps consist of group of (usually young, usually international) volunteers working together on a project for a period of 1 to 6 weeks e.g.

Building a children’s adventure playground, painting a youth club, building a village school…

This collective living and working experience brings about an awareness of people of various back grounds, a contact with the local populace and feeling of concrete solidarity. Work camps educate not only the participants but also the local population, with whom the project is organized and who will continue the work started by the volunteers.

Board and lodging are usually provided, but in most cases neither pocket money for salary. Travel expenses to and from the work camps are normally

Covered by the volunteers themselves, who also have to pay a registration

Fee

International work camps are open to people of 18 years and over. In general

They do not require any particular skill (though there are sometimes selection criteria for intercontinental exchanges) the emphasis is on participation in a project in the spirit of international cooperation, in which each person works to his or her own capacity.

There is a network of exchanges mainly during the summer months when thousands of volunteers cross frontiers and do useful work and make new friends, there are also exchanges of work camps within Africa and Asia and

Between associations in these continents and their partners in Europe and North America.

Volunteers are normally recruited through a volunteer association in their own country, which then arranges the placement through a partner

Organization in the receiving country.

Aims of work camps

** To unite a group of individuals who have a desire to perform voluntary service and provide them with a chance to work on a project useful to the community.

** To provide assistance and support to local projects, to act as a catalyst to

Local voluntary effort. The work undertaken must be suitable for volunteers and not compete with paid labor.

** To promote contact between people of different cultural and social backgrounds breaking down linguistic and cultural barriers and creating understanding and appreciation of others.

** To provide education through experience. To enable volunteers to learn the positive effects of concrete action and to recognize the interrelationship between theory and practice.

** To give people the experience of group life where all members are equal and to permit them to learn to accept responsibility both for the work done and for the functioning of the group.

** To provide an inter-cultural learning experience and the opportunity to explore a new country and a new cultural in a deeper and more respectful way than as tourists.

** To ingrate participants into the local community so as to learn from their hosts about the issues, which concern them and their responses.

** To help develop small-scale infrastructure or environmental improvement.

** To promote a ‘ culture of peace ‘ on an international, regional or national level (e.g. after civil war) by developing democratic and non – authoritarian structures, integration, solving problems peacefully, reducing ‘ enemy images’ respecting differences, communicating –all this through working together.