Organisatsiooni kirjeldus:

Experience
What are the activities and experience of your organisation that are relevant to this application?

Between 2003 and 2017, dozens of young people between the ages of 18 and 30 from European countries such as France, Hungary, Greater Britain, Germany, Iceland, Czech Republic, Greece, Sweden, Slovakia, Austria, Portugal or Italy were welcomed by GEPEC-EdC within the framework of the EVS (European Voluntary Service) program through an intermediary association, PROA, which carried out all the procedures. Currently, this entity is inactive or with a very low metabolism.

These volunteers, after a personalized welcome from our staff, did a lot of work very important for the association and the ecosystems it manages. Especially the dunes and marshes of the municipality from Torredembarra, from where many of their performances pivoted despite having accommodation in the city of Tarragona.

The types of work ranged from customer service, to beach cleaning, plant care, accompaniment of people at risk of exclusion in various environmental tasks such as the control of invasive exotic flora species or the accompaniment of association technicians in field work such as forest inventories or monitoring of specific species of flora and fauna, such as bats and endangered birds.

This last fact, together with our extensive experience in hosting hundreds of young volunteers and internships in these more than 36 years, to the recent collaboration of personnel with long professional experience in reception and management of people from other countries and the recent refurbishment of households on the coastal estate of El Canyadell, the result of a agreement with the Altafulla City Council, led us to take the step of being the host and manager of 4 volunteers from January 2021 of this program.

Does your organisation have previous experience in cross-border activity and cooperation outside Erasmus+ and the
European Solidarity Corps? If any, please describe this experience.

In addition to 14 years of experience in the European Voluntary Service program with dozens of volunteers, our
association together with two others from Italy (Legambiente and Gruppo Abele-Nomos) carried out in 2003 the project "The
Illegal trafficking in hazardous waste in Italy and Spain "to combat illegal traffic in radioactive waste with the
financial support from the European Commission, DG Justice and Internal Affairs.

Please mention any existing international partnerships your organisation has built, through Erasmus+ or the European
Solidarity Corps or other activities/programmes.

Since November 2020 we have been in contact with 3 European associations that also belong to the program of the European Solidarity Corps, they are the sending organizations that accompany the European volunteers we now have here. An association in France AAAMI (OID E10058482), with the Eurosud association in Italy (OID E10185527) and with Dansk ICYE in Denmark (OID E10094641). These associations were in charge of doing the insurance procedures with CIGNA from the European volunteers that we received in January and March 2021 to start their activity with us and they also took care of doing the pre-departure training. They are in regular contact with us to
keep track of the volunteers through our reports that we pass on to them on a quarterly basis. They also have supported us in finding solutions to face the difficulties caused by the current situation of the pandemic in order to receive European volunteers and thus be able to move our project forward. The same Associations will take care of accompanying European volunteers after finishing their stay with us.

We also have a very close relationship with other associations in Catalonia that are also receiving volunteers within the framework of the European Solidarity Corps such as Emys Foundation (OID E10178430) and SEO Riet Vell (OID: E10068284) to exchange experiences, to share doubts and to organize meetings of the European Volunteers so that they also have the opportunity to share their experiences and meet other associations and their projects.

The Trenca and La Sinia associations, with whom we have already collaborated on environmental projects for years, and the
Tierra y Sal association that has our contact from an ex-EVS program volunteer, have contacted us because they are studying their possibilities of presenting a project and requesting volunteers within the framework of the European Corps of Solidarity to ask us for help, we are clarifying some doubts they have and explaining how we have presented our project in the program.