After the study visit in Madrid, I attended the next one in Roma, hosted by our partners from Italy : CSV Lazio.
The hosting structure
CSV Lazio is a service centre for volunteering of the Latium region in Italy, it was created in 2019 by two different services for volunteering with more than 25 years of experience in this field.
It’s a non-governmental and non-profit organisation which aims to promote and strengthen volunteering in the whole Latium Region composed of multiple regions such as Viterbo, Frosinone, Rieti, Latina and Rome.
It’s a network of more than 100 voluntary organisations.
10.5% of the Latium population is active in volunteering
CSV Lazio is working in different fields :
- social assistance to disadvantaged groups
- environmental protection
- promotion of health
- civil protection
- promotion of culture
The study visit
Our study visit started on Monday, the day we travelled toward Italy. We arrived around 8pm on Monday evening and decided to go for a night walk in Roma to visit the city a little. We managed to see some of the most famous places in Roma and went back to the hotel to rest a little for the activities that would start on the next day.
On Tuesday, we went to meet the participant of this new study visit. As always in the Vosotros project, some new people are coming to the study visit, so we meet new people every time. The beginning was for the introduction of the project, organisation of the time and explanation about the project and the study visit to come. We decided on which topic we would like to work on and split the team in four groups : the volunteers/mentors, the Structure, the territories and finally the beneficiaries. These are the four different topics the project is focusing on.
During the afternoon, we started the visit by interviewing some volunteers from CSV Lazio and went to visit our first association : Centro Astalli which is a centre that hosts migrants and offers them Italian classes, food, and other resources to help them. They are supported by the Catholic Church.
Then, on Wednesday, we started the day with some time to talk with our group about what we saw on the day before and to organise ourselves to find out about questions and conclusions that we would get for the following two days. After this time, we went to the municipality of Rome to discuss and to discover the civil service in Italy. We learned a lot about this status provided by the Italian government, which looks like the French voluntary service. For the afternoon, we split in two groups to go to different associations to be able to cover more places in the small amount of time that we had in Rome. We had some time in the city for lunch to visit, this is why we decided to go to see the colosseum and to grab a pizza before joining our group.
We went to a centre for migrants where only volunteers are working. It was fascinating to see what the people were doing to help others in need. And we were able to ask them some questions related to the effect of volunteering for our project. After this visit, we went to a school where the parents created an association, a network to work on some after school activities for the kids and to build trust between one another.
For the last day of the study visit, the morning was devoted to talk in groups to summarise what each group of the day before saw and what their conclusions were. Then we went to a fascinating place called Spin Time, which is basically an illegal place hosting migrants and working to do some activities to help them get access to culture and to a “normal” life. Their work there was really interesting as we were able to see an auditorium, a museum with temporary exhibitions, a kitchen for everyone to eat and even the headquarters of the editing of a newspaper done by some young people trying to talk about what the media are forgetting.
We ate there and spent the rest of the day synthesising the study visit and trying to move on with the project as it was one of the last study visits.