Eastern European volunteer ambassadors – transferring best practices and model solutions of museum volunteer programmes (eeVa)
Recently Museum of Fine Arts Budapest and Latvian National Museum of Art received confirmation that their application in the Lifelong Learning Programme Grundtvig programme Senior Volunteering Projects received the grant.
The two project partners met in Copenhagen at the Museums Meet Adult Educators (MumAE) conference (2010) organized in Vartov in the framework of the Grundtvig project. The Latvian coordinator participated in the workshop Volunteering in museums held by the previous cooperating partners, the coordinator of The Manchester Museum and the Hungarian coordinator. Here was a special enhance on volunteer management and Grundtvig cooperation opportunities. This session then inspired the opportunity of a cooperation between these two institutions from countries with similar historical backgrounds and so similar challenges raised by general rejection towards volunteerism.
The European Year of Volunteering 2011 seems to be a good occasion to expand volunteerism tradition – when both national governments put more emphasis especially on youth volunteerism and so this could be expanded over the senior generation through this project.
In the European Year of Volunteering the partners plan to initiate a special exchange of volunteer experiences between 2011 and 2013 to bolster the Latvian museum volunteering - now in its initiative phase - by adapting the well established Hungarian know-how, and to help the Budapest programme to develop new volunteer activities based on the Riga programme. Both institutions are pioneers and leaders in their country in museum volunteering. The Budapest Museum of Fine Arts was the first one in Hungary to organize a volunteer programme and now serves as an example to other museums. The Latvian National Museum of Art, still unique in organizing a volunteer programme in a Latvian museum, hopes to further develop and transfer this knowledge on national level.
During the project the Latvian volunteers will understand the Budapest programme from the induction training through the follow-up of the volunteer activities to the termination of the contract in order to transfer this methods to their home institution both in practice and through their reports. The Hungarian participants will learn about Ambassador Programme in depths and would help in its adaptation by sketching the model during their stay and later discussing the draft adaptation plan with the coordinators.
Project coordinator:
Ineta Zelca Simansone
