Volunteers as multipliers

Volunteers gain a better understanding of their role within the global community as they directly experience the connections between international policy agendas and life at grassroots level. This motivates many volunteers to increase public knowledge of development issues and challenge aspects of their own society upon their return.

Many returned volunteers continue to be active in community or international development through work, volunteering, or donations. Furthermore by approaching them as peers, they can often spark students' interest in certain issues where teachers and parents might fail to get a response.

Volunteers act as multipliers - but how?

Sending organisations and educational institutions therefore increasingly recognise the role that returned volunteers can play in promoting global awareness and citizenship both in the communities where they volunteer and even more back in their home country – building bridges between citizens around the world.

However state-funded IYVS programmes such as the German 'weltwärts' programme do not only want to support young returnees to stay involved in development issues; they oblige volunteers by contract to become multipliers upon return. This poses the danger of instrumentalisation and might not be conducive to longer term motivation for voluntary commitment.

But according to surveys the majority of returnees is motivated to commit themselves to enhance global justice. Yet the specific knowledge of volunteers acquired through their voluntary service does not automatically qualify them to act as multipliers of development issues. So the main question is:

What kind of qualification and support do returned volunteers need within the scope of follow-up measures in order to be able to act as peer-educators?

On the following pages you can find out more about existing measures to build capacity among returnees. We also present interesting campaigns and activities organised by returned volunteers in different EU countries here.