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VZW THE OUTSIDER CLUB, is a youth organsation, recognised by the Flemisch gouvernement. We are situated in Oudenaarde, in The Flemisch Ardennes in Belgium, but our activties are organised all over the country. However, most of our activities take place in Oudenaarde.

The aim is to help young people to integrate and take part in a creative and constructive way in our dynamic world of today. All the activities are focused on increasing the feeling of personal and social responsibility, sustainable environmental education and helping the development of life leading skills.
Our organization gives the possibility to discover and develop your hidden resources through real adventures and challenges. We want the volunteers to learn more about our work in youth education and outdoor-sports activities. We want them to get a good attitude in work and social life. We are willing to teach them every detail of our skills, technical and organisational know-how. We want to teach them the security rules and all about international rules.
During this project, the volunteer will do a lot aff things; The main task will be to organise and guide kids and young adults, sometimes families and schools, during youth camps or sports days and weekends. They will guide them on rope courses, water activities, hikes and other adventure sessions.
One objective within this project is that the volunteers learn a lot about how to deal with people, about intercultural differences in society and about themselves. In addition, almost all of our outdoor activities take place in nature. Nature management, nature education and caring for nature are therefore highly valued within our operation.
Volunteers will also have a major contribution to make in this respect, because together we make sure that our forests stay clean, we build new paths or activities in such a way that our outdoor sports activities can continue in a good setting. Another major objective is the development of organisational competencies.
By organising youth camps and sports days the volunteers learn how to plan and how to communicate with colleagues. A good time management is necessary to organize a good camp.

Our main activities are:
A. The Outsider Club organises youth camps for kids between 5 and 16 years. The most important topics of our youth camps are outdoor activities, adventure, sports and teamwork. We organise youth camps during every holiday session and on different places. Sometimes people sleep for one week at the camp site, mostly they go home in the evening and come back the day after.

B. We also organise trainings for young people on very different topics:
- That can be about technical items of outdoor life and survival skills or about different rope topics. It can also be about technical items of outdoor sports such as initiation on climbing, canoeing, hiking...
- It is also important about how to become an animator in youth work. Here the topics are more about pedagogy, how to prepare and organise different activities for kids, how to handle discussions...
- We also do a lot about informal learning or learning by doing. Here we focus a lot on items such as leadership, teamwork, communication, motivation...
- There are also trainings how to work with disabled people in adventure situations.

C We do organise quite some youth camps for disabled kids. There are quite some parents who does not have the financial capacities to let there kids go and enjoy youth camps with a lot of (sometimes) expensive outdoor activities. So we organise those camps together with social organsations. Those activities requires a special approach (hygiene, food, social approach...). Therefore we also organise special trainings for animators who organises these camps.

D Besides we have also a focus on how to work with handicapped people in an adventurous setting or while doing outdoor and/or sports activities. Here we learn a lot by doing it our selves because there is not that much existing information about it.

E We also organise activities for 1 or half a day for young people. Those activities can be about everything. Sometimes city gouvernements asks us to organise, sometime other youth organisations ask us to help... Mostly those activities are about sports, creativity sessions or outdoor skills.

F We also have a focus on the international level, especially about Europe. So we do organise international youth camps, promote volunteering projects and other initiatives which bring different groups of people together.


So our target group is young people between the age of 5 to 30 years old. However older people can help in the organisation of those youth activities.

Important issues in the way we work are envirement, nature, quality, safety. We implement these items through all our activities and the way we work, by quality systems, check lists and other organisational tools.
We have an open mind and want to help all kids and young adults, without any exceptions!