The European Commission is calling on interested parties to put forward ideas for projects under the European Solidarity Corps. The deadline to apply is 16 October 2018, except for projects of volunteering teams, who have time to apply until 18 February 2019.
A total of €44 million has been set aside from the EU budget for selected projects that will be open to all young people across Europe and beyond. This is the first of a series of calls that will allow at least 100,000 young people to take part in the Corps until the end of 2020.
Which projects are eligible?
The call is open to a broader range of projects than ever before: in addition to longer-term individual volunteering, traineeships and jobs in solidarity fields, the following projects will be eligible:
- Organisations will be able to offer short-term projects (from 2 weeks to 2 months) for teams of volunteers.
- Organisations will first need to receive a quality label, for which they can apply at any time by submitting a request to the Erasmus+ national agency, or in certain cases, to the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency.Not only public and private bodies established in EU Member States can apply for funding. Young people registered in the European Solidarity Corps Portal will also be able to form a group of at least 5 participants and set up youth-led solidarity activities themselves.
- Certain European Solidarity Corps projects in the field of volunteering are also open to the participation of non EU-organisations from Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Turkey, the FYR of Macedonia and other partner countries.
Next steps
Projects under the call for proposals launched today will be selected once the European Parliament and Council formally adopt the Commission proposal, following their political agreement in June 2018.
Background
The detailed conditions of the call for proposals launched today, including the priorities and instructions for submission of applications for each project can be found in the European Solidarity Corps Guide.
The European Solidarity Corps was launched in December 2016. Since then, 72,000 young people have registered and about 7,000 of them are involved in solidarity activities.
On 11 June 2018, the Commission put forward its proposal for the European Solidarity Corps beyond 2020, allocating €1.26 billion to allow about 350,000 young people to take part in a solidarity activity.