This year’s “SCI Placement Officer Training (POT) 2025: Making Volunteering User-Friendly” will take place from 13-19 February in Bern, Switzerland.
BACKGROUND OF THE TRAINING
Placement officers of the world, unite! In this annual training – Placement Officer Training (POT) -, volunteers or staff in SCI who place (other) volunteers in volunteering camps have the opportunity to get to know all the practical procedures, the OPS online database, tips, tricks, possible challenges and good practices around that – as well as to get a better understanding of SCI as a movement and the possibilities of getting active in it and making it more inclusive.
SCI is about connections. With this training, we want to make sure that the placement of volunteers goes smoothly in 2025 and that all placement officers feel well prepared for the many situations coming ahead. At the same time, the training is a way to get to know each other better – the people
participating here will be people you will stay in contact with via e-mail all year and it is a great opportunity to get to know the faces and the personalities behind the names.
Online course to prepare you in advance. As part of this training, we are expecting you to go through the online course for placement officers on the SCI learning platform before. It will revolve around placement rules and the Online Placement System of SCI. You can do this course at your own pace before February 2025. In November and December 2024, we will still work on updating the online course. If it is not possible for you to participate in this training on site in Switzerland, you could still do the online course.
This year, the Placement Officer Training (POT) will take place from 13th to 19th February 2025 in Bern (Switzerland). We will have a special focus on whatever is already known about the new placement system by this point. For this reason, also POs with experience are invited to join, if they are interested in deepening their understanding of the new system.
PARTICIPANT’S PROFILE
The participants will be staff, activists and volunteers from volunteering organisations that are part of the SCI network (no matter if they are branches, groups or partner organisations of SCI). The training is open both for newcomers and people with placement experience who want to refresh their knowledge.
All participants selected for this project must meet the following criteria:
- be 18 years old or older
- work with placement of volunteers in their sending organisation (which is either a branch, group or partner of SCI)
- be able to work in English
- commit to implement the learned knowledge and skills in practice back home
- commit to actively participate from the beginning to the end of the training
We explicitly encourage participants of all genders, sexual orientations, abilities, learning styles and ethnic backgrounds to apply.
Please note that there will be opportunities to visit Bern, but that this is not a “getting to know Switzerland” project. On some days, the training also foresees evening sessions.
LOGISTICS, FINANCIAL CONDITIONS AND SUSTAINABILITY
Simple life: The seminar will take place in a scouts center with very simple living conditions. You will sleep in a room shared with other people. We will ask you to bring your own sleeping bag + pillow and we will do our best to provide them for those for whom it’s not possible to bring. Showers are shared with other people as well, we will make a shower schedule.
Money, money, money: Some notes here:
- For partner organisations that we could sign up to be official partner organisations for the funding application, we can cover all essential costs of the program (including food, travel costs up to a maximum amount, visa costs, accommodation and seminar) through a grant by the Swiss government agency Movetia. Your sending organisation might ask for a small participation fee.
- However, as we received less money from our funder than expected, we ask SCI member organisations that send 2 placement officers to this training to cover the travel expenses of one of their participants.
- The maximum amount of travel costs we can cover differ from country to country:
○ Austria, France, Germany, Italy: up to 200 CHF
○ Rest of Europe: up to 400 CHF
○ Tunisia: up to 500 CHF
○ Australia, Colombia, Kenya, Nepal: up to 1000 CHF - For organisations that could not join the funding application, you would need to pay essential costs yourself: travels as well as 140 CHF for accommodation and 12 CHF per day for food (= travels + 206 CHF).
Sustainable food: The food we provide will be vegan. This is not just a practical decision, but also an ideological one: SCI believes in the values of sustainability and climate justice – and if we want to contribute to a more peaceful planet, we need to give up on industrialized animal agriculture
and its destructive effects on our planet.
Sustainable travels: This is also why we ask you to come to this training through more sustainable means of transport rather than flying (e.g. by train or bus), if somehow possible. We will give you more guidance on how you can reach the venue, once you are accepted to the seminar.
HOW TO APPLY?
You can apply by filling out this application form. All those accepted will later receive a detailed infosheet (incl. info on how to get to the venue, how to book your travels, more info about the agenda of the project). First deadline for applying is 30 November 2024.
CONTACT
If you have any questions regarding the project and your application, don’t hesitate to contact Thomas at t.schallhart@gmail.com. We are looking forward to your application 🙂
The coordinating team
Sara, Thomas and the SCI Switzerland team
This project is financially supported by Movetia. Movetia promotes exchange, mobility and cooperation within the fields of education, training and youth work – in Switzerland, Europe and worldwide.
