Over three days during the period from Tuesday, August 28 to Thursday, August 30, 2012, Maat Foundation for Peace, Development and Human Rights held training workshop for young volunteers in a campaign to mobilize community resources to help the families of prisoners and detainees, under the title “Enable volunteers to manage field campaigns and motivate the community to help families Prisoners”.
The workshop comes within the context of the implementation of project activities of integrated protection for the families of prisoners and detainees “Integrate and Rehabilitate” which is implemented by Maat and funded by the Swiss Foundation “Drosos”. This project seeks to improve economic and social conditions for the families of prisoners and detainees through a set of interrelated activities and integrated targeting family members themselves, as well as other parties of community from the areas that project is carrying out.
In the workshop, (33) of young volunteers have participated from areas that implemented the project in the districts of: El-Basateen – Dar El- Salaam – Helwan – Khalifa – Imbaba – Boulaq Dakrour, in addition to Atfih Center. The percentage of volunteers involved was above the target number by 10% of the workshop.
The training workshop addressed several issues; the most important was the concept of volunteerism, how to manage volunteer efforts, how to estimate community resources, how to design and plan a volunteer campaign, importance and mechanisms of teamwork. Training program has adopted innovative technologies such as presentations and short films and role-playing and group games that reinforce the value of work teamwork between volunteers.
The training included each group of volunteers from one area to make job action plan progress to begin field campaign in the region to stimulate the community to help the families of prisoners and developing social responsibility towards the prisoner’s family, especially in the field of providing educational assistance to the children of these families. These job action plans will be revised through sessions with volunteers in the days immediately following the workshop to reach the final formula.
It is assumed that the trained volunteers during the next phase by the assistance of Maat Foundation will implement social giving campaign through their paying 1800 field visits at least for both the private sector and civil society organizations, families and educational institutions to be aware on how to donate and its methods and how to know the path of their donated resources, then receive in-kind donations of educational materials and preparing them for distribution to needy families of prisoners and detainees, to provide a database to the children of families in need of help, whereabouts and how to contact them so that the able go forward directly to these families and to provide them with assistance.