HOW WE FIGHT POVERTY

OUT OF OUR OWN EXPERIENCE

• EAPN EUROPEAN

• BAPN NATIONAL

• Regional Networks REGIONAL

• Associations where people experiencing LOCALpoverty take the floor

ex. T’Hope & De Zuidpoort

INTRODUCTION

Voluntary work

@

T’Hope

– To see if you can find what you’re looking for in our organisation

– We expect you to have a link with poverty: do you have the experience of living in poverty or what strikes you about it?

– We are not a service provider

– You can also stay in contact without really engaging actively

We start with a conversation

What do we have to offer?

• You can get in touch with people, making social contact– 2 moments every week when we get together,

all year long– recreational activities, weekend– trips: cultural, visits to associations,

campaigns (October 17th)– training: computer, photography– facebook

What do we have to offer?

• You can participate in organizing things:

– Bar, during meetings and after familynight

– Computer permanence

– Recreational activities

– Surprise trip and weekend

What do we have to offer?

• You can take the floor, speak up– conversation evenings: give advice– theme-work during meetings and start a

dialogue with services and policy makers– Speakers: testimonials and lifestories,

workshops– Research projects– Social artistic Theatre

What do we have to offer?

• You have a say in what we do with our association: – During conversation evenings – During home visits – Direct and personal contact with the

professional team and the board

How does it work?

• Make choices: you can chose where en where not to participate at any given moment. Some projects do demand an engagement for a certain period of time: theme-work, theatre, training.

• Your opinion does matter: the contribution of someone who is more active or who is engaged for a longer time, is not necessarily more interesting than that of someone else.

• We always work in tandem: a tandem can be a duo but also a larger group of volunteers with and without poverty experience

How does it work?

• We do not let go of you or leave you alone, even if you let go of us: if you are dealing with a difficult period in your life and you’re therefore not up for voluntary work, volunteers stay in touch. And if you want, you can always pick up again later on.

• Care is central, to stay connected with everyone and for the relations in the group. Via home visits, conversations and training

Organization

• No conditions : there is no contract, no request or demand for competences

• The engine of our work: working in tandem and direct communication

• Participation: the organization’s development is based on the themes (employment and training, youth in poverty, new volunteers) and the pace of the volunteers

Organization

• Organic growth: we search for financial sources for the themes the volunteers choose, not the other way around

• Professional work force supports the volunteer and translates the experiences and points of view of the volunteers - in tandem – towards professional organizations and policy makers

Empowerment@ T’Hope

Regain one’s strength

– Making social contact

– Becoming part of a group

– You become important for the group and the organization

– You have a new a goal in your life, something to strive for

Regain one’s strength

– It is a change in your spiritual condition: lots of people think they’re worthless, in a group you are important for others again

– after years of exclusion, you can finally find yourself (again)

– you can be who you are (again)

To get stronger“You are surprised that you do have skills,

because society has treated you as if you had none, since your childhood.”

“You discover that you can develop these skills and that you can carry them out.”

– Everyone has skills, some people have the chance to get to know them at an early stage in life and further develop them, others don’t

What is needed?

– You need to be able to choose what you want to do and what you want to try, even if you follow another path than the one society had in mind for you

– To discover these skills and develop them, you need to be able to experiment a lot. It is important that you can start over again after you’ve failed, if necessary, ten, or a hundred times.

What is needed?

– You need people you can trust, who believe in you and keep believing in you

– If you fail, it is important that other volunteers do not give up, that they keep in touch with you until you find the strength to try again

What is needed?

“Here, we can take the floor, here people work bottom up, not top down. There are a lot of places where that is not possible.”

“Society consists of many forms of exclusion, you are always classified into your box. Here, these boxes dissapear and you are able to grow, develop.”

This principle is obvious in the tandem system, but it is actually inherent to the organisation, it’s everywhere!

• Fotos t’hope?

• Fotos t’hope?

• Fotos t’hope?

• Fotos t’hope?

Voluntary work

@

DE ZUIDPOORT

What do we do?

Open Meetings

Cooking : twice a weekCooking : twice a week

Parliament : once a month

Creative Workshops : Cooking

•

Creative Workshops : Making Candles

Creative Workshops : Crafts

Themegroup Culture

Themegroup Wogi

Our four-day vacation

Our four-day vacation

Family

Employement

Social Contact

Law Welfare

Income and debt

Housing

Health

Education Culture

Trainings for schools, organisations,…

Trainings for our group

Other activities initiated by people with poverty-

experience

WOGI: What!?

• W = werk• O = opleiding• G = gezondheid• I = inkomen

= E E H I : employment, education, health, income

Central theme of the WOGI: voluntary work!!

Competences

• What is it, what does it mean for us?

KNOWLEDGE you need to have to perform a task/activity

CAPACITY to really execute a task/activityATTITUDE: what you need to ‘be like’ to

perform the task/activity

Competences

• Why do we work with competences?

RECOGNITION of what volunteers do and can

Make people CONSCIOUS of the competences they have

Encourage SELF ESTEEM STIMULATE the development of these

competences

Competences

• Why do we work with competences?

STIMULATE to use these competences elsewhere

Show society the value of voluntary workShow that associations where people

experiencing poverty take the floor encourage people’s talents

…

Competences

• How do we work?

– Every two weeks: list of tasks for volunteers. For every task we ask ourselves: what knowledge, what capacities are needed, and what attitude?

– OSCAR-instrument

– Work with personal competence cards

– Keep working on it in group: important!

Example: competences needed for the task of ‘cooking’

Competences

The value of voluntary work

in De Zuidpoort by Patrick

Testimonial

2. We see the trend that a lot of voluntary work now is a replacement of a normal paid job. Is that a tendency you also see in your countries? Is that the direction Europe wants to go? What needs to be done?

3. What are the conditions to which voluntary work needs to answer in order to be accessible for people experiencing poverty? What should the environment/circumstances look like?

Discussion

1. Can voluntary work be imposed/obligated?

1.

2.

Recommendations

3.