What challenge inspired this recipe?
When being in a completely new environment and culture, many ESC volunteers can need psychological support in adapting to these changes. However, seeking out help in a new country can seem difficult and unmotivated at times and the support system provided by the National Agency might not always work the best or be enough. For this reason, we have also developed additional options for volunteers to receive psychological support, so when they really need it, we could be sure of having some contacts to offer to them.
Ingredients :
For this practice, it is most important to have people/staff members who can research different options for mental health support in the host country.
Step by step guide
We have made sure that there are different options for psychological support for all volunteers at all times.
The first option is the psychologist service offered by the National Agency of Estonia. They are working with a professional company in Estonia and the psychologists they provide are also familiar with the concept of ESC and the most common issues a youngster can face in the program. In case of doubt or a need for help, the volunteers can either contact the Estonian NA directly or through their ESC coordinator and are provided up to 3 free counseling sessions with the psychologist. All volunteers receive this information on their on-arrival training.
However, there have been situations where due to different reasons, the NA has not been able to provide us with a psychologist fast enough. In these cases, our second option is a great Estonian NGO Peaasjad, which consists of mental health and youth work specialists, consultants, and supporters from different fields. Among their other activities to promote topics related with mental health, they also provide free online counseling sessions with professional psychologists. We have received positive feed-back about this service from many volunteers by now and recommend this as the second option for psychological support. The volunteers can easily sign up for the counceling sessions themselves on the website of Peaasjad.
And finally – should the free sessions not be enough to help the volunteer, we also have a budget in the exceptional costs of the project for additional psychological support. This means each year we apply for our ESC project, we add around 500€ in the exceptional costs field for additional psychological support and so far our NA has been very supportive of this, as we all believe that no volunteer should be left without professional help due to lack of funds. Luckily we don’t always need to use up this budget, but there have been many times where it has been useful in order to provide the continuous support of the volunteer.
It is very important that all members of the volunteer’s local support system (mentor, tutor, coordinator) would be aware of this multiple option system. We usually go over this on the regular online-meetings we organize for our host organizations + mentors’ meetings. Of course we inform the volunteers themselves of these opportunities upon their arrival as well.
Important to highlight!This practice has been proved to be efficient based on many situations where volunteers have been able to get professional mental health support through the system and to a different extent, according to their needs. |
Before you start cooking, keep in mind…
Of course this practice has it’s limits according to the services available in the host country – whether there are any public offers of such free mental health support. Also, it can depend on the National Agency, if they accept such type of exceptional cost.
