On Wednesday 30 November 2022 the association Vicolocorto was invited by the ESN (Erasmus Student Network) of Urbino to a conference entitled “ESN meets Vicolocorto”. The aim of the conference was to inform young students from Urbino, members of ESN, about other European and international mobility opportunities, whether voluntary or work-related.
In fact, in addition to Carolina Tenti, coordinator for the association’s European Solidarity Corps (ESC) programme, and two European volunteers from the Red Cross of Pesaro, Paola Diotallevi and Barbara Raspugli, Eures assistants at the CPI of Fano and Urbino respectively, also took part in the conference.
The conference was held for two hours from 5 p.m. in a room of the Faculty of Sociology in Urbino; the choice of the late afternoon time was strategic in order to give most of the ESN students the opportunity to attend, as they were free from classes at that time.
The first hour of the conference was led by the two Eures assistants, who spoke about the functions and functionalities of a CPI and, then, about all the job mobility opportunities that Eures offers, as a European cooperation network of employment services, conceived to facilitate the free movement of workers; from the Targeted Mobility Scheme (support and funding for the first work experience abroad) to the European Employment Days (real job “fairs” in which one can participate online and from the comfort of one’s home).
The second hour, on the other hand, was led by Carolina Tenti from Vicolocorto association, first with an explanation of the European Solidarity Corps programme, also showing the calls currently open on the association’s website; then, introducing a local project in collaboration with the Marche region that will start in January 2023, “SMM: Self-Made Man. Le parole per dirlo, l’esempio per farlo’ (SMM: Self-Made Man. The words to say it, the example to do it), which will offer young people between the ages of 18 and 35 local training opportunities through free workshops offered by eight Pesaro partner organisations and conversations in English offered by the Vicolocorto.
The young people present, about fifteen from the ESN of Urbino, were all local university students, some of whom had already left for Erasmus, others about to do so, and others, for various reasons, still without a real study abroad project. They proved to be very interested, especially in the questions asked to the two European volunteers from the Vicolocorto association, Eszter Stumpf from Hungary and Raluca Vintan from Romania.
The girls are European volunteers of the ESC programme here in Pesaro at the CRI (Italian Red Cross) and coordinated by Vicolocorto, together with three other volunteers from Pesaro. They arrived respectively in October and mid-September and are carrying out 12-month and 9-month projects. They were very happy to have the opportunity to report on their experience, why they chose a project abroad and decided to leave, why they chose Italy and the CRI, what they are learning and doing, and what plans they have for their future.
The motivations are clearly very personal: Eszter is about to turn 30, so she left at the end of her chance, she had never had any experience abroad or spoken English because she had worked in her country since a young age where she did not have this need, and now that she is acquiring new skills every day, she feels motivated and feels that she is growing a lot, despite being older than the other volunteers. But perhaps the most successful was Raluca, a former ESN board member from Cluj-Napoca, her home town in Romania, who aroused great interest in the youngsters, especially as she explained that “Erasmus is a wonderful experience of growing up and getting out of your comfort zone, but doing a volunteer project with the ESC programme brings the volunteers closer to the local communities of the places where they do their service, because they do activities with local community realities, where Erasmus, unfortunately, is a bubble where you risk spending the whole period abroad surrounded by other Erasmus students and with little contact with the local community”.
It was a truly enriching afternoon, for the speakers and the young people involved, and Vicolocorto association hopes to repeat the experience with other ESN committees, which have a pool of young people who are certainly interested in intercultural enrichment and exchange and mobility, due to previous experiences.
Carolina
Vicolocortini 