Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2016-10-27-Speech-4-032-000"
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"en.20161027.3.4-032-000"2
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"Mr President, I want to also thank my colleague, Silvia Costa, for promoting this oral question to the Commission. Whilst the EU does not have competence in academic education and curriculum per se, it can be a formidable platform to recognise and promote the role that volunteering, together with sports and arts, plays in strengthening socialisation processes and for the development and wellbeing of societies and individuals, education for citizenship, and in acquiring lifelong transferable skills.
Initiatives such as the EVS are more important than ever in times of economic hardship and high youth unemployment, increasing job prospects for young people. The challenge now is to ensure that they are accessible to the most vulnerable young people as well, and for people of all ages and horizons, including people with special needs, minorities, marginalised communities, migrants and refugees. In fact volunteering is a great opportunity for intergenerational learning and intercultural dialogue, necessary to build strong, open and inclusive societies. It must therefore be part of a long-term strategy to develop successful, functional and welcoming communities proud of their heritage and united in diversity.
Indeed, informal and non—formal settings, widely used in the context of community education and work with underrepresented groups, provide opportunities for active promotion of common values of freedom, tolerance and non—discrimination and for learning about human rights, including women’s and children’s rights. Openness, tolerance, enriching experiences and encounters, intercultural dialogue and cultural diversity: those are the fundamental elements on which the EVS is based – and so is the European project. Particular recognition should therefore go to those who volunteer in times of crisis, stepping in when governments fail to act, such as the amazing volunteers who have done so much to help the desperate refugees in the Calais and Dunkirk camps, and also the British Muslim youth groups, who were amongst the first people to help the victims of last year’s terrible floods in Cumbria in my north—west England constituency, bringing together different ethnicities in a spirit of shared humanity.
As a young person, I learned my values from my parents, but also from my experiences of volunteering. I am one of the people who was failed by conventional formal education, and I found my confidence, my sense of myself and my place in the world largely through volunteering. As a shy, gauche teenager, I joined a youth theatre, where, alongside our normal activities, we spent one evening a week volunteering at a centre for children with profound disabilities. These children became my friends, and I learned to overcome my fear of difference and to fight prejudice and discrimination for the rest of my life. Later I set up many youth theatres and watched young people in my care, many of them troubled and excluded, learn civic values and transferable skills through volunteer projects in their local community and through pan-European and international volunteering experiences. They were doing as I had done: encountering the other through intercultural dialogue and practical action, thereby learning tolerance and mutual respect.
I therefore welcome the Commissioner’s statement, but I want to give a word of warning. Volunteering must never be used as an excuse for national governments to cut public services, such as museums, art centres, theatres, libraries and youth clubs, which is, sadly, happening in my country under the current Conservative government, who are replacing real jobs by exploiting the good nature of public-spirited citizens. Volunteering programmes that go hand in hand with a strong social structure and proper investment in public services, offering young volunteers recognition and career pathways and valuing the life experiences of older volunteers, are what is needed in modern society."@en1
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