The Voluntary Centre of Trento

English presentation about the Voluntary Centre of Trento

Nowadays 78 Volunteer Centres (CSV) are spread all over Italy. They were established according to the Voluntary National Law (266/91) in order to “standing and training up for the voluntary work” by the allocation of free services such as training, promoting and communicating ones addressed to all the associations and to every single volunteer. They are private organizations financed by Bank Foundations according to particular systems as provided by the law itself.
In this instance the Centre of Trento (CSV-Trento) was established in 2002 and acts in the north-east of Italy, in the Trento province, providing its own services through a qualified and willing staff. The services it supplies are included within these particular areas:

• the culture, solidarity and voluntary work promotion.
• the advice and qualified aid in legal, tax and administrative matters.
• the volunteers training.
• information and documents about local and national voluntary work activities.

Six people work in the Voluntary Centre of Trento and 93 voluntary associations are CSV members, most of them working for health care and welfare services. The other ones applies for civil activism, international solidarity, education, culture and sport.

Advice
The Advice Area is a service of us much in demand now. Several associations and citizens make a great use of the Legal-tax and Administrative Advice Service in order to gain information about the applicable documents and norms and the associations world to check the possibility to set up new ones. The goal of the service is supporting associations in updating and in the achievement of legal-tax and administrative matters concerning the voluntary work world.

Promotion and Social Planning
The most strategic area is the Promotion one, as it contains all the tools and particular activities allowing the Center and associations to promote voluntary work and solidarity learning. The aim is to promote voluntary through local community awakening and standing up for of new activities in order to spread the training of solidarity values and active citizenship. The tools taken into consideration are: the guidance counter to voluntary work, panels with associations, meetings with other national centers, CSVnet and other particular activities.
Particular priority is given to youthful voluntary work promotion through the starting up of some special activities addressed to schools and to the young world in general. Its main purpose is approaching young people to the voluntary work world giving them the opportunity to gain an association and a civil activism experiment. Through the Social Planning Area CSV-Trento places resources at the associations’ disposal in order to achieve their own projects. Experimental and innovative ones, answering a need of the local territory, carried out by the associations themselves with the main players of the local development are best encouraged.
CSV gives associations a free service of professional advice about its own announcements of competition and those ones at local and national level, helping them in developing and creating their own projects.

Training
The purpose of the Training Area is qualifying the voluntary work by developing and improving the organizational, managerial and planning activities of the local associations, required to assure a high quality level to voluntary organizations activities. Starting from the power of getting together all the users and territory needs to targeted planning and design, to volunteers searching, to the training and improvement of our own workers, to the assessment and presentation of a financial statement of the services provided and to the organized fund raising.

Information
The aim of the Information Area is to promote and stimulate communication between the voluntary work world and the local community, involving associations within the CSV-Trento information exchange and updating area. Thus we aim to improve and increase local associations visibility by drawing public opinion’s attention to their several activities. The tools we use are, for instance, our internet website, containing all the details about the most important activities regarding the non-profit organization world; the newsletter, a tool organizations can use to get and give information on their own activities and the local press. Once a week a local newspaper “Il Trentino” places one page at CSV-Trento’s disposal that associations can use for a free publication of articles and interviews to introduce themselves and activities they provide for.