Through 11 years of fruitful experience, the World Heritage Volunteers Initiative has mobilized over 5000 youth volunteers who participated in more than 350 action camp projects in about 60 countries, organized by over a 100 organizations and institutions, at about 150 World Heritage sites.

Despite this outstanding growth of the World Heritage Volunteers Initiative, the organizations implementing action camps still face substantial challenges that affect the proper implementation of the action camps.

To address these challenges, the Capacity Building Training Workshop for the Team Leaders of the World Heritage Volunteers Initiative was organized in order to reinforce the capacity of the organizations and improve the outcome and sustainability of the action camps in the future campaigns.

A shared learning experience

The five day workshop was held from 12 to 15 March, 2019, at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, and welcomed team leaders from around the world to build their capacities in project management, fundraising, communications, and monitoring and evaluations of the action camps.

It gathered 18 team leaders from WHV implementing organizations in all the five regions (Bangladesh, China, Germany, India, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Morocco, Palestine, Philippines, Republic of Korea, Russia, Togo, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe), with past participation in the WHV Initiative, and who will be implementing WHV camps in 2019 or in the following year.

Through a series of lectures, discussions, debates and group activities conducted by experts and facilitators through non-formal tools that employed interactive approaches to knowledge transmission, the participants had the opportunity to interact with each other and share experiences and common challenges in implementation WHV action camps.

Every day brought a new discussion and offered new and creative learning methods for the participants to learn about the aspects of the project implementation they were struggling with.

Through mind maps and problem trees, the participants achieved “SMART” objectives for efficient project management. They created road map activities to identify their key stakeholders and defined targeted messages for advocacy and communication. Through a dedicated day of training focused on fundraising, the participants learned about new ways to improve funding possibilities, the 9 Fundraising “No”s typology, engaged in case studies, performed SWOT analyses of their organizations, and created compelling cases for their donors. As the training drew to an end, they engaged in a ‘retroplanning’ activity, to reflect backwards on all the required steps that should be fulfilled while planning, organizing and implementing the WHV camp, in order to have successful project.

A successful outcome

At the end of the workshop, every participant took home not just a set of newly developed skills, but also the experiences of all the fellow team leaders. The workshop created a strong bond between them and gave them the chance to learn from each other. Their exchanges gave them an opportunity to discuss and form possible synergies amongst their organizations, in turn guaranteeing the reinforcement and the commitment of the team leaders of the World Heritage Volunteers Initiative, and the continued participation of the organizations in the upcoming editions of the WHV Campaign.

About the Capacity Building Training Workshop

The Capacity Building Training Workshop for Team Leaders of the World Heritage Volunteers (WHV) Initiative was organized in the framework of the World Heritage Volunteers Initiative, which is led by the UNESCO World Heritage Centre in collaboration with the Coordinating Committee for International Voluntary Service (CCIVS), European Heritage Volunteers and Better World. The workshop was funded by the Netherlands Funds-in-Trust.