On 12 December 2016 in Zagreb, the volunteer centres meeting, organised by the Croatian Volunteer Centre Network is held. The purpose of the meeting is discussions on situation of volunteerism and development of volunteer centres in Croatia and Slovenia, networking and establishing quality cooperation of volunteer centres at the national level.
The participants were the representatives of the Slovenian Philanthropy, the organisation that works on the development of volunteering in Slovenia, Croatian Volunteer Centre Network and the others from Croatian local volunteer centres. On behalf of the Local Democracy Agency Sisak and Volunteer Centre Sisak, President Paula Raužan and Volunteer coordinator Matea Strižić participated the meeting.
Participants exchanged experiences and useful information on future cooperation, aiming to put volunteerism on a higher level.
Welcoming speeches gave Mrs Lejla Šehić from Volunteer Centre Osijek, Mrs Jelena Kamenko from Croatian Volunteer Centres Network and Mr Primož Jamšek from Slovenian Philanthropy. During the meeting a new trends in volunteering in Europe and worldwide is presented, together with state of volunteering and development of volunteers centres in Slovenia and Croatia and cooperation possibilities between these two neighbours. Important aspect of the meeting is new quality standards of Croatian regional and local volunteer centres and its certification process, which is to start in 2017.
The main objective of this process is ensuring quality labels firstly for regional and afterwards for local volunteer centres, in order to work further on gaining community trust, new knowledge and work frameworks for increasing accountability towards beneficiaries.
Volunteering as a form of active involvement in society with a proactive change initiatives is still novelty in Croatia by which citizens, and especially young people, need to get familiar with, working in parallel in raising-up a voluntary activities and services quality.
General conclusion is that volunteering do motivate activism and is one of the fundamental parts of an advanced society, and therefore work on its growth and acknowledgement is not be put a side.
