Update: My Year as a Volunteer at Visioneers in Berlin

Now month nine of my federal voluntary service is already over and I'm slowly heading towards the end. Five months ago I wrote a first blog article about my time as a volunteer, what has happened since then?

Our Visioneers team has grown over time and there are many new faces in the team, including Miriam and Sabeth, who as social pedagogues take over a large part of the youth work and are two super contact persons for me. In addition, Andres from Costa Rica is now also a federal volunteer at Visioneers.

I show him the programs we work with and explain tasks to him. It's fun to work with him and learn new things about his culture. He has already taught me a little Spanish, and I can already answer "¿cómo estás?" (proof: Muy bien y tu?).

At the moment my workday looks like this: twice a week I work in my home office, then I do tasks on the computer, e.g. designs for social media, forms for weltwärts or updating the website. The rest of the week I'm in the office or in the welcome class at the Sophie-Scholl-Schule. Since the schools have reopened, I regularly go there again to support the students in learning German and accompany Giresse during the workshops in class.

I was also able to get an insight into our current projects. For the project Mobile Jugend Lernhilfe.Jetzt I was in a residential group in Berlin-Dahlem from January to March and supported the young people there in their daily homeschooling tasks. It was not always easy to motivate the students, but over time I got to know them better and knew who ticks how.

I also worked at least briefly on the Learning Bridges project. During the Easter vacations, I worked with a colleague to offer a vacation learning period at Carl Sonnenschein Elementary School, where students had the opportunity to catch up on what they had missed.

It is a pity that many projects could not take place or had to be postponed. Above all, I sometimes miss the contact with the young people. It would be very nice to experience the open youth meeting at Visioneers.

But for now, I'm looking forward to the projects that are still coming up, like the summer vacation school and the weltwärts seminar in Presence.

The final seminar of my voluntary service could even just take place in "semi-presence" and I was 3 of the 5 days in the seminar house with part of my seminar group. I am very happy that I was able to be on site for a few days at least during my last volunteer seminar and it was really nice to get to know the other volunteers better for once and to be able to exchange ideas properly. Apart from that, it was also pretty cool to get to know more people at once and to spend the night together in a seminar house, a bit like a vacation.

But even though the last months were very much marked by the Corona restrictions, I always had something to do and the workday was not monotonous. In the meantime, I can say that I have already become much more independent, at work, but also otherwise in everyday life. I learned a lot about other cultures and religions, German as a foreign language and the daily work in a non-profit organization. For me, the volunteer service at Visioneers was exactly the right decision, which I would make again and again.