From 30 July, the VSS 2016 team is ready to welcome over 250 participants to the 9th Edition of the EFIL Volunteer Summer Summit in Venice, Italy.
The VSS offers workshops in five different tracks, all under the theme “Education for Peace: the challenge of living together”. The organising team of 12 skillful AFS trainers, 15 dedicated support team members and an eager prep team have been working hard over the past months to provide an interesting programme for the highest number of VSS participants ever.
Participants are given the opportunity to specialise in 5 different tracks, choosing themselves the track that interests them the most. The tracks are “The role of AFS in society”, “Conflict resolution and mediation on a micro-scale”, “Peace Education in formal and non-formal contexts”, “Inclusion of minorities” and “Peace Building Initatives”. In addition to the variety of workshops within each track, participants are also given the opportunity to attend workshops from 8 recognised experts on intercultural learning and peace education; Darla Deardorff, Pat Patfoort, Uffe Gravers Pedersen, Giovanni Scotto, Clive can den Berg, Giulia Sissa, Uli Zeutschel and Martyn Barrett.
To ensure that the VSS gives outcomes that participants will take home to their local communities and AFS organisations, there will be an Open Space at the VSS where participants across organisations can get together and start initiatives on their own. In the final session, there will be a voting on the best projects which will receive a start-up scholarship from EFIL.
We are happy to see that the VSS is constantly growing. This year we will welcome participants from 41 different AFS organisations across the world; from Iceland to India, Austria to Australia and Slovakia to South Africa and of course many more!
Welcome to Italy and VSS 2016!
