European Voluntary Service (EVS)

What is European Voluntary Service (EVS)?

European Voluntary Service, more popularly known as EVS, allows young people (18 to 30 years of age) to volunteer in another country for a specified period, normally between 2-12 months.

Volunteers in EVS projects participate in activities such as: environment, arts and culture, activities with children, young people or elderly, sports...

People's Parliament is accredited EVS organization (EIRef: 2009-SI-16) which can host volunteers from Europe, send volunteers from Serbia to other countries in Europe and coordinate EVS projects.

What we can offer you in terms of hosting?

Most importantly, we can provide you with opportunity for participation in our youth projects. This can, in the most effective manner, improve your project management and youth work skills, as well as general knowledge on youth work. You will therefore be gaining useful and practical work experience and help development and management of our youth projects.

If you are interested in other issues, such as legislation, local governance and public administration, cross-border cooperation, basically issues we also work on, we can also provide you with a learning opportunity in these fields, too.

We work through 3 program areas, as it can be seen on our Internet presentation, through which we implement most of our project activities.

We also have 3 long-term projects (programs in fact) dealing with different issues.

One of these programs deals with young people and we, mostly, work on youth entrepreneurship promotion and development, and youth participation, besides other youth-serving activities.

The second program is connected to domestic legislation and as a part of it we implement activities that firstly, influence national government to introduce new legislation and change existing ones, while at the same time we monitor and help implementation of laws related to information of public importance and data protection.

The third program is a long-term EU funded project where we work on improving of access to health protection services for young Roma through theatre and art besides more main-core approaches towards this issue.

Therefore, you will likely have to be involved (in management sense) in either of these projects & programs. However, depending on our current projects, there is a possibility that you will involved in implementation of other, short-term projects, but most likely in area of youth-serving.

Besides these, we can provide opportunity for you to participate in other programs & services that are not directly managed by us, but rather by our partner organizations & institutions, such as culture institutions, charities, professional associations, local and regional public state bodies, even profit-making organizations. All in-line with your preferences if, for instance, you have somewhat different interests than what we can offer you through current projects and programs that we manage.
Moreover, we can provide you with an opportunity for intercultural learning and interaction with your peers from whole Serbia and other countries from Europe due to the range and nature of our national and international projects, and the fact that we can also host you in other communities in Serbia, and provide you with opportunity to participate in other youth programs & services managed by our partner organizations & institutions.

If you'd rather work with us all the time, when logistics are concerned, we can offer you separate working space in our office premises in center of Leskovac which can easily facilitate your physical placement enabling you to work alongside our staff.
You will, most likely, have to be accommodated in a rented furnitured apartment in city center where you will have to get self-organized concerning yours meals arrangements. However, there is a strong possibility that we will provide you, in order to make it easier for you, with one meal per day in a restaurant arrangement.
When local transportation in Leskovac is concerned, urban area of the city is not large and a person can get everywhere on foot, especially to our office premises and other organizations & institutions we cooperate with. If it is necessary, we will, of course, provide you with suitable transportation solution.

Other information concerning your prospective hosting location, Leskovac, can be found on City of Leskovac Internet presentation.

If you are interested in us sending you to volunteer to other countries in Europe, than you need to look at our EVS page in Serbian language, as we can only send citizens of Serbia.

What we expect if we are to host you?

The profile of the volunteers that we can host are young people, preferably aged between 24 to 30, having an interest in non-formal youth education and strong motivation for intercultural learning. Generally young people that can afford to spend a longer time period outside their countries and are willing to work during their EVS.

Since the activities in our organization (youth ones) are mainly focused on youth entrepreneurship and youth participation, it is desired if you are interested and have clear motivation for learning and working in those fields, too.

Your specific role, as it greatly depends on your abilities and interests, can range from activities in which you could be involved in work with young people and therefore getting concrete tasks to assist us during project management, up to helping us with everyday work and regular office duties.
You could assist in diffrent phases of project development – planning, implementation, direct work with project users and evaluation. Also, you could assist project managers in facilitating trainings and meetings with young people and youth groups, conducting educational or other activities through workshops and/or youth camps.
Moreover, you could be given a chance, if you are up to it, to organize and run intercultural activities with participants of different projects managed by us and/or by our partners, which could include presenting your own country to other young people. These activities could be intercultural evenings, presentations, workshops, social activities...

You will, most likely, have to spend up to ~10% of your working engagement on attendance of Serbian language course that will be organized for you in our office premises, and you are expected to spend additional ~40% of working engagement on administrative and other everyday work duties which usually are very versatile.
The rest of the time, you will likely have to assist in implementation of concrete project activities, such as meetings, trainings, seminars, campaigns...

Considering the fact that we are very active youth-serving organizations with constantly active youth-serving projects and long-term programs, as well as range of contacts with many governmental and non-governmental institutions/organizations from Serbia, possibilities for learning opportunities for volunteers that we host are almost limitless and can be more responsive to your interests and abilities.

Are you interested in volunteering?

If you are, the most appropriate way is to contact Mr. Goran Mitrovic.

Also send your CV (photo of yourself included) to tell us more about who you are.