Volontariato Torino (Vol.To) is the Volunteer Support Centre of Turin. Vol.To is an umbrella non-profit organisation with 160 member organisations and a network of more than 1.300 voluntary associations. Their mission is to qualify and support volunteers in order to enable them to seize opportunities and take individual paths of development. For this purpose they develop projects to increase the interest in voluntary works as well as build tailor-made learning paths on the needs of volunteers.

The “PerGioVE! Periferie, Giovani, Volontariato, Europa” project had the objective of creating innovation and social development in a specific area of the City of Turin, the so-called “District 5”. It is a suburban area with problems of marginalisation, poverty, and high youth unemployment rate. The vision of the project was to invest in the “urban resilience” of young people, especially those who are disadvantaged, and to boost young people’s capacity of creating spaces to develop relationships and social exchanges and thus promote equality, social emancipation and self-determination.

The specific objectives of the project were:

• empowering disadvantaged young people belonging to families in hardship by informing them with mobility opportunities abroad as an occasion of social redemption;
• providing tools and services to associations, schools and young people to facilitate initiatives addressed at the local community;
• sensitising a group of young people about issues of social relevance (prison, disability, migration and cultural contamination);
• accompanying a group of young people in the creation of a project explaining the added value of the European Union.

Youth, Volunteering and Europe were the keywords from which the “PerGioVE!” team started to outline four specific actions with different activities, but linked one each other:

1. Creation of a “Welfare desk”, with the aim to orientate the families in hardship.
   
   
2. Activation of a “Vol.To and Eurodesk Point”, in the same premises of the “Welfare desk”, aimed at providing orientation to volunteering, information on European mobility initiatives for disadvantaged young people coming from the families in hardship cited above.
   
   
3. “Focus on District 5”, specific activities for young people from “District 5”:
   1. • information meetings about the Prison of Turin and the possibility of volunteering in initiatives for prisoners;
      • a street art workshop in cooperation with the Guerrilla Spam group, whose results were an authorized mural painting and the drafting of the map of an imaginary island, but representing the “District 5”;
      • Eurodesk presentations about mobility opportunities abroad in the high schools of “District 5”;
      • Volunteering@school: meetings about the values and the importance of volunteering, held in the high schools of “District 5”;
      • DisAbility: experiences of "Flipped Classroom" for teachers and organisation of an event dedicated to the schools in occasion of the 2019 International Day of People with Disability (IDPwD).
        
        
4. ProjecTO: application for a Solidarity Project within the European Solidarity Corps programme, carried out by a working group, already involved in the other activities of "PerGioVE!".

The project resulted in 2981 consultancies and bureaucratic procedures at the “Welfare desk”; 221 disadvantaged young people asked information at the “Vol.To and Eurodesk Point”; the street art workshop involved 24 girls and boys aged 13 to 28, all residing in the “District 5” of Torino; 6 Eurodesk presentations were held in the high schools of “District 5”, totally involving 255 students; a group of 12 young people involved in the Solidarity Project within the European Solidarity Corps, already submitted, which is expected to have a positive impact on 1.000-1.500 people; 539 young people generally involved in the various activities of “PerGioVE”.

http://www.volontariatotorino.it