As a way to celebrate everything we accomplished with our volunteers and to thank them for their unreasonable engagement at euforia, we rented a scout house near Bern and celebrated our Volunteers Day.
The day started with croissants and euforia’s annual general assembly. Our president Corina Helfenstein recapped euforia’s activities in 2015 and euforia staff gave an overview of what’s cooking up for 2016, presented euforia’s financial figures and validated the volunteers circle as the new strategic commission. After sharing an indoor picnic (despite our best wishes, the sun didn’t show up in Bern), our Storytelling Wizard Sonja gave us insights and tools in a workshop on how to best tell our changemaker stories. In the afternoon we moved to sports: one group consuming (Switzerland playing against Albania at the European Championship), another implementing by climbing the local mountain Gurten. Upon their return, beer o’clock was announced and kicked off the beginning of the party night.

As you could already read in our annual report, our volunteers community is growing fast. In 2015 alone, we could count over 80 new volunteers. In total, over 400 people have been engaged in our programmes during the past nine years and many of them still are.

As our volunteers are the core of our organisation, we aim at including them as much as possible in strategic decisions and in the operational daily business. At the General Assembly we looked at how we are reaching that:

We launched the new “volunteers circle” at the beginning of the year. Five volunteers are part of the new team and are going to foster community building, facilitate communication between staff and volunteers and contribute to strategic decisions. Welcome Manon, Osi, Nicole and Gordon!
Ten volunteers are now engaged within euforia staff as “boosters”, part-time and project-based freelancers. Meet them here!
Local chapters are going to be built up soon in order to connect volunteers living in the same region and to bundle our whole changemaker potential. The local chapter in Zurich started a soft launch with a casual coffee meeting last Saturday.

Thank you all who were there and spent the Volunteer Day (and night) with us! If you missed it: stay tuned, the next celebration is sure to come!