INTERNATIONAL VOLUNTEER DAY 2022: LAUNCHING RYVU POLICY BRIEFINGS AND DOWNLOADABLE GAMES
The RYVU project is celebrating this International Volunteer Day with the launch of a series of policy briefings and interactive games in Arabic, English, French, and Swahili, providing tools and recommendations from the research findings for improving volunteer policy and practice amongst refugee communities.
The International Volunteer Day (IVD) is commemorated across the globe every year on the 5th of December to recognise the invaluable contribution of volunteers to their communities. Whilst this is a special day to celebrate solidarity through volunteering, it is also an opportunity to reflect on the barriers to volunteering, and the critical challenges faced by volunteers who are themselves from communities facing hardship.
The IVD 2022 United Nation’s campaign “Together, act now” encourages unity and urgent action to promote, mobilise and advocate for volunteering, highlighting the remarkable and growing impact of volunteers worldwide. To mark this date, the RYVU project is launching a series of policy briefings and interactive games that draw upon RYVU findings on how volunteering affects skills, employability and inequalities experienced by young refugees.
These resources (free and available for download in Arabic, English, French and Kiswahili) provide accessible ways for academics and practitioners to engage with the project’s evidence base and improve research, policy and practice in volunteering, particularly amongst refugees.
The policy briefings provide key research highlights and recommendations on how policy-makers and humanitarian and development practitioners can enhance the impacts of volunteering on refugee skills and employability, while promoting fairer practices for recruiting, training and recognising refugee volunteer activity, and prevent volunteering from increasing the inequalities they might experience.
In addition to the briefings, the RYVU interactive games are creative tools developed to raise awareness of the issues young refugee volunteers face and explore what volunteering means to them. There are three different games: (1) RYVU Volunteering Journey, a role play game to open up discussions on personal volunteering experiences and key issues to take into account when engaging refugee volunteers; (2) RYVU Volunteering Diamond, a ranking game exploring volunteer motivations and meanings of volunteering and how they can be perceived differently in policy and practice; and (3) RYVU Photo Pairing Game, a card matching game use photographs taken by young refugees to explore different perceptions, understandings and experiences of volunteering.
These games have played a key role in the engagement and dissemination activities undertaken by the RYVU team in Uganda, the UK and Senegal with young refugees, government officials, and staff from humanitarian and development organisations. All games can now also be downloaded in accessible formats (in colour or black and white) in multiple languages.
