🇮🇹 Volontariato Torino
🔗 volontariato.torino.it

Volontariato Torino (Vol.To) is the Volunteer Support Centre of Turin. It is an umbrella nonprofit organisation with 160 member organisations and a network of more than 1,300 associations. It serves as Service Centre for Associations according to the national regulations for volunteering (L. n. 266 of 11th Aug 1991; M.D. dated 8th Oct 1997). It merged experiences and staff from V.S.S.P. and Idea Solidale (the two former Volunteer Support Centres of Turin), becoming one of the five biggest Volunteer Support Centres in Italy.

Vision and Mission

Vol.to’s vision is a future in which the distinctive features of volunteering – free and self-giving, reciprocity and trust, passion and spirit of initiative, responsibility and care for each other – will be a guide for individual and collective challenges.

Mission is to qualify and support volunteers in order to enable them to seize opportunities and take individual paths of development. For this purpose, projects are developed to increase the interest in voluntary works as well as build tailor-made learning paths on the needs of volunteers.

Vol.To works to provide free services (such as training, consultancy, planning assistance) to assist the voluntary associations in the Province of Turin. Thanks to its key position within the volunteering network in Turin and in Italy, it aims at generating new opportunities for the territory.

Staff and activities

Vol.To can count on more than 20 people of staff and 11 local offices in the whole Province of Turin (2,297,000 inhabitants and almost 11,000 nonprofit organisations).

In 2019 the Centre aims at provide 600 general consultancies (as information, grants opportunity, search for volunteers, etc.) and 800 specialist consultancies (such as fiscal and legal, project planning, etc.) to more than 600 different Voluntary Associations. For the next 12 months more than 20 VET courses for volunteers have been already scheduled in several topics as foreign languages, ITC, leadership, fiscal and social administration, etc.

Vol.To is also a member of CSVnet, the Italian Association of Volunteer Support Centres, where it is represented within the board of directors. It’s a full member of CEV, the European Centre of Volunteering in Brussels, a European network of over 80 national, regional and local volunteer centres and volunteer support agencies across Europe.

In 2012 and 2013 the association was involved in two European projects related with development of skills: the first, VOLMANEL “Volunteer Management e-Learning” (ref. UK/11/LLP-LdV/TOI-484), was a LLP Transfer of Innovation project aiming at identifying and enforcing the set of skills related with the curricula of the Managers of Volunteers. The other one, AWAKE (ref. 2011-1-PL1-GRU06-19982), was aimed at identifying the educational needs of seniors in different EU countries. In 2013, the organisation was partner in the Grundtvig project “Volunteering as a tool for inclusion” (ref. 2013-1-SK1-GRU06-06467-8).

In Sep 2014 Vol.To started its first project in the framework of the Erasmus+ programme. The TAP project, “Together Against Poverty” (ref. 2014-1-PL01-KA204-003326), is aimed at reducing the poverty rate in Europe (EU2020 goals) by studying the different welfare systems in the partner countries and at developing a course on entrepreneurial skills for policy makers and people at risk of poverty. In 2015 started BEVIN project (ref. 2015-1-PL01-KA204-016557) that aims at promoting the recognizability of the adults’ competences, acquired through non-formal and informal learning.

Vol.To is accredited as a coordinating and hosting organization for the National Voluntary Service (l.n. 64 of 6th March 2001, organisation code NZ01965, ref. Regione Piemonte, Ufficio Servizio Civile). Every year it organizes specific events to raise the awareness about the National Civil Service and to promote the applications from the youth in the Civil Service calls.

Vol.To recruited and selected volunteers from Piedmont to take part at EXPO 2015 that was held in Milan: more than 400 people have been involved from the organisation.

Since 2016, Vol.To is also the official Eurodesk Centre of the City of Turin, providing free information for the youth about international mobility opportunities connected with learning, training, volunteering and working and also a first source of free counseling and help for the organisations and the informal groups in order they can approach the European projects planning and design. This new membership became the occasion to put, together with Eurodesk, existing services (the “Volunteering Orientation Desk”, National Civil Service counselling point, the project design counselling point) by creating a new counter called Gio.VE “Giovani Volontariato Europa” (which means “Youth, Volunteering and Europe”). Since the very beginning, the aim of this new counter has been taking the activities of the Volunteer Support Centre closer to the youth world.