Bona Fides Association and Anton-Afritsch Children’ Village are looking for volunteers from Poland or residents in Poland, to join our European Solidarity Corps project in Austria in order to be involved in preparing, organizing, running and evaluating introducing the intercultural aspect in the daily life of the children and young people. Send your Curriculum Vitae and Motivational with a subject “Children’s village” to the following emails:   mariachiara@bonafides.pl , iryna@bonafides.pl and euinfo@logo.at.

  • Location: Steinberg, Austria
  • Deadline:  CLOSED
  • Duration: 10 months
  • Mobility period:  01.02.2021 to 31.12.2021

Project description

Anton-Afritsch Children’ Village is located at Steinberg, about 8 km from Graz, the second biggest town in Austria. 38 children and adolescents are currently living in the children’s village – which celebrated its 60th birthday in 2018. The youngest are five and the oldest nineteen. They are looked after 365 days a year by a total of 30 social pedagogues.
Children and young people can find a protected development framework, receive support an accompaniment in all areas of life in order to process their socialization experiences. The children and young people are supported in developing their personalities and enabled them to lead an independent and responsible life. In addition, social and professional integration is promoted.
Activities of the Anton Afritsch Children’s Villages department:
• Children and youth groups
• Mobile assisted living
• Supervised living groups
• Therapeutic offers
• Family / parent work

Project details

There are three ESC volunteers in the project, who are working in separated houses and teams. Volunteers will never be alone with the kids or teenagers. The 3 candidates have their own working fields and tasks.
Still every field is settled in the Kinderdorf Steinberg, a place a bit outside of the city. The volunteers will help the children to spend an interesting free time.
The role of the volunteer mostly consists of introducing the intercultural aspect in the daily life of the children and young people.
The volunteer will be integrated in the daily routine (living in a group, studying, free time), especially in planning free time activities for children and young people. The volunteer supports the employees during free time activities (creative activities, sports etc.), since one of our goals is to foster each child according to his/ her own needs and to offer group activities, which are planned together with the children and young people. That means we also want to make the volunteer participate in the planning of these group activities for the free time. We would also very much like to get to know as much as possible about the volunteer’s home country.
A typical day in the Kinderwohngruppe can be like this:
The job starts at the noon, a volunteer can arrive and have lunch. Children come back at 2pm from school,
the volunteers talk to them about the news in the school, their homework and about what to learn. They can help them to set working plans. The volunteers can help them to get more organised. After the children have finished their tasks for the school, at about 5 pm, the volunteers can help them to plan their free time.
For example, they can go jogging or biking with some kids. At 7pm they have dinner together. Volunteer help to bring children to sleep.

Working hours and days off

Total working hours of the volunteer per week: 35. A volunteer has two consecutive days off per week.
These two days can vary and will not always be Saturday and Sunday. The volunteer will have 2 days holiday per month for the duration of the project which he/she can take at a stretch as agreed upon with the host organisation.

Accommodation and other expenses

The volunteers will live in a student flat in Graz with single bedrooms but shared cooking, washing, laundry, bathroom, and social facilities. The volunteer will receive 230 € for food/month. Additionally, the volunteer has the possibility to have lunch & dinner for free at the host organization on all his/her working days.
The host organisation will provide a monthly ticket for public transport. The volunteer will take the bus to go to work.
According to Program guidelines, a volunteer receives pocket money 5 €/day.

As a office worker:
Your aim task will join the office team and help them out with different tasks. They could be planning the projects, do the bookkeeping, keep in touch with the intercultural cooperation, write projects for Europe Erasmus+, etc. Most of our office workers are from other countries, as we are very open-minded in hosting international leaders from other organizations. All our leaders start their program with one week of training.

Study theme:
In the year 2020 global warming will be the study theme in all our camps. Each working day the volunteers will have study sessions and practical training on how to reduce our personal impact on climate change.