BRIDGE IT: Part 3 — Empathy
We are four girls all over Europe and our Bridge it! -team is helping volunteers to become better in their work. The aim of Bridge it! is to connect volunteers to each other and to provide valid information and education to them across countries. If you are planning to become a volunteer or if you are already volunteering just be a Bridge and join us here: (https://sticklkata.wixsite.com/bridgeit). Welcome to share our journey in Medium! ❤
After failing while trying to contact refuge shelters we decided to focus on volunteers. We had already volunteers who were willing to be interviewed but we also wanted to ask from common people what they think about volunteering.
One of the first piece of our research was gathering data from our friends and schoolmates. We asked them what people understand a refugee to be if they had ever interacted with a refugee and whether or not they had volunteered to help refugees. And our third question was whether they ever visited a website that would focus on helping refugees. For this graph, we got an answer from 64 people in our surroundings.
As you can see, many of our respondents already met with the refugee. And more than half of them volunteered to helped them, whether it was financial or material help. However, only 13 of them have ever visited a website that focuses on volunteer help to refugees.
After this research, we interviewed more closely 3 volunteers at the beginning of December. They all are currently working with refugees in Athens. This is what we asked:
The responses were quite positive and it can tell that they really want to help other people. The only negative thing they told was that volunteers aren’t having a lot of support or education for volunteering. Volunteers were afraid that if something unexpected happens while volunteering they don’t know how to act. They were also worried that it is quite hard to find support or peer support for volunteering. It is important to have an opportunity to share thoughts and feelings with other volunteers. Besides support inside the country was an issue, volunteers also said that volunteering and becoming a volunteer is especially hard when you try to go to another country. For us, this support thing the volunteers were talking about was something we got our eyes on.
For us, this support thing the volunteers were talking about was something we got our eyes on. Can we, for example, make a platform which is giving information and support to volunteers all over Europe or even all over the world?
Our team: Saara Kyllönen, Kata Stickl , Ivana Cervena and Svetlana Lukyanova
Our story: part 1 , part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8, part 9
