Together on the topic of Mental Health of Young Volunteers - Moments from the first day at our International Professional Meeting of the VOLU-MENT Project.

From the 10-14th of November, our project team of System and Generation, Mr. Gürkan Akçaer, Mr. Ahmet Nusret Demir, and Ms. Ida Marie Lykke Elsborg, went to Budapest in Hungary to participate in the first offline professional meeting of the VOLU-MENT Project together with the three other project partners from Georgia, Portugal, and Hungary. 

For this meeting, it was our Hungarian partner, Talentum Alapitvany, to host the consortium and facilitate activities in the city of Budapest. During this week, we truly discovered why the city is usually called "the heart of Europe". What an impressive place we visited and what a fruitful meeting we held.

On the 11th of November, we had our first in-person work session with the whole partner consortium. The overall aim of this meeting was for partners to get to know each other better, both on a personal and professional level, build on lessons learned from partners up until now, collaborately plan the upcoming tasks, and decide on the next important steps for progress in our work and success in our cooperation. With this meeting, we feel strongly motivated to continue this close collaboration and make it last throughout the entire project period of three years.

We opened the meeting by getting to know each other better as persons, partners, and organisations before we moved on and dived into the analysis of our good practices within the field of mental health support of volunteers. For the second topic, our team member, Ms. Ida Marie Lykke Elsborg, delivered a presentation of the synthesis, summarising similarities and differences between countries and across the whole case collection. The presentation was followed by a fruitful group discussion in which every partner presented their case portraits for each other and explored the key elements and points to learn from and take away from the meeting. Here, we surely learned that there is a lot to learn from each other when we explore our practices for supporting volunteers' mental health, though many similarities also appear to exist.

We ended this first day with a nice guided city tour in the streets of Budapest.

Go to the project page to find more details. 

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The project is funded by the European Union under the Erasmus+ programme.
Project number: 2024-2-HU01-KA220-YOU-000286625