Our Shared Europe Global Xchange programme

A 6 month voluntary exchange programme in Egypt and in the UK

As part of the Our Shared Europe Youth & Leadership strand we have collaborated with Global Xchange to recruit young people between 18 and 25 years old to participate in a multilateral volunteering programme. A total of 24 volunteers have been drawn from 6 different countries - the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Egypt, Yemen and Morocco. These volunteers will be hosted by two countries during the exchange - Egypt and the United Kingdom. The volunteers will live and work for three months in Sharkeya, Egypt. Immediately afterwards, the next three months will be spent in Southwark (London), the United Kingdom. The volunteering programme will start on 7 March 2010 and will finish on 20 August 2010.

Each volunteer will be partnered with another volunteer from a different cultural background. Both will then be placed with a host family and work as volunteers with a local community organisation for four days per week.

The Global Xchange Programme is based on a model of youth exchanges originally developed in Canada over thirty years ago. This was brought to the UK in 1999 by Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO). Since 2007, VSO and the British Council have been developing Global Xchange to become what it is today.

Visual Narratives

To maximise the impact of the volunteer programme – on the volunteers themselves and on a wider audience – volunteers will be provided with the skills and tools to produce powerful visual narratives. These are images that tell a story, and a way for the volunteers to share their experiences during the programme. The British Council in the Netherlands is leading on the visual narratives project.

At the beginning of the programme in Egypt the volunteers will receive training from the professional photographer Sander Foederer. The training will be a two-day workshop and is planned to take place in Sharkeya, Egypt on 28 and 29 March 2010.

Volunteers will work in six groups of four, each group producing photographs to create a collective visual narrative. During their 6-month stay in Egypt and the UK, volunteers will submit their selected images to the British Council every two weeks. After each submission, these will be uploaded to the British Council, Our Shared Europe and Global Xchange websites to ensure they are shared with a wide audience.

The volunteers’ experiences during the programme will be captured in Sharkeya by Sander Foederer and in Southwark by a British Muslim female photographer who is currently being commissioned.