Explorator

Explorator Association was founded in march 2008, due to the initiative of 4 young people involved in international volunteering activities. In present, in the association are more than 11 motivated volunteers in participating in civic activities. Until now, our association involved more than 200 romanian young people in volunteering activities and civic actions, from which around 50 people in YIA projects. In this way we offered the chance to those young people and also mostly to young people with fewer opportunities to have a multicultural experience. The goal of the association is to organize actions to inform and promote, but also to train and sustain social actions through civic involvement and volunteering projects. Through the implemented projects we want to stimulate the initiatives of youngsters to mitigate the impact of the risk factors that lead to marginalization and social exclusion of young people, to develop partnerships with public and private institutions in order to stimulate the involvement of young people in the life of the community and also to promote the benefits of active citizenship. Also, our association is focused on developing informative actions and to educate the youngsters related to the European values and to promote the principles of democracy. Since it was founded until now our association developed various projects in the field of YIA, both like coordinating and in partnership. We will mention few of this projects: - Youth exchange Action 3.1 "The Universal Childhood Games" addressed to the social problems of discrimination and racial prejudices identified in the childhood games from every nation. - Project "Make-it your-llenium", approved on Action 5.1, implemented in partnership with local authorities from Nederland and Latvia, focused on the need of respecting the Millenium Development Goals from the treat signed between these countries. - “Human Rights” training course, Action 4.3, regarding the human rights respect in the democratic and European countries, and also regarding the ways of solving different problems of human rights violation - “Get involved” Training course, Action 3.1 aimed to promote the volunteering in the context of European civic involvement - “P.R.Democracy” project for participation democracy capturing the evolutionary elements of democracy after '89. - “Make a step!” training course of Action 3.1 focused on identifying the most useful strategies of civic involvement in the society - etc. From workshops based on different topics to participation democracy projects and decision makers meetings, our association offers to the youngsters from the community the chance to develop their personality and to gather specific competencies in specific fields. Explorator Association’s members have a great experience in organizing and implementing volunteering projects, both financed by European Commission or local funds. In the YIA field the members of the association have experience for at least 3 years, so they want to expand the experience and also the cooperation in the EVS area, in order to contribute more in solving the problems of our community and not only. Also, the members consider they gathered experience in this field enough to expand it to host and send volunteers for different periods of time. In order to understand better the idea of EVS, the members of our association participated to the training course “Erasmus +” that is describing the new program, held in Craiova in September this year. Also, they participated to the EVS Caravan in order to meet EVS volunteers and association and to share experiences. Also, in the past, our members participated to the course ”Writing funding proposals within Youth in Action”, developed in Craiova in 2010. All the competences and the experience from this courses and meetings were shared with the other ones, in order to understand the implications of the EVS. Also, the experience from the projects implemented was shared in the interior of the association in order to understand everybody what was well done and what we need to improve. Regarding the objective of promoting the European values of non-discrimination, toleration and social flexibility, the association aims to facilitate the youngster’s mobility from their community to another country in order to help people that need. Also, members of Explorator want to attract and involve more local volunteers in specific activities, because Craiova has a lack of young people civic participation. In this way, the activities that will be developed will contribute to the development of the community and also to the personal development of youngsters involved in volunteering activities. They will gather new skills and competencies applicable in future in other local or international projects. Regarding the activities developed, even if only one member of the association has EVS experience, we indent to apply a EVS project for the next deadline in order to offer the opportunity to young people to have the long term volunteering experience. In this way, the local volunteers will understand what means EVS and which are the benefits, in order to participate also in future in experiences offered by EVS projects. In other order of thoughts, cooperation over time with various public institutions, faculties and high schools, local and international Ngo’s, we perfected the project management and has boosted our continuing success.