In May 2022, the ABC-EUAV capacity building project came to an end – after more than two years of activities that were adapted time and time again due to COVID-19 and war.

ABC-EUAV stands for Accompanying and Building Capacities in the EU Aid Volunteers initiative, a project aimed at strengthening nine Caritas organisations in the field of volunteer management, disaster risk reduction (DRR) and organisational emergency preparedness. It brought together organisations based in the EU (Caritas Austria, Caritas Europa, and Caritas Romania), the Balkans (Caritas Bosnia and Herzegovina, Caritas Kosovo, and Caritas Serbia), and in Eastern Europe (Caritas Armenia, Caritas Georgia, and Caritas Ukraine).

Caritas staff planning the activities of the project during the kick-off meeting in February 2020, unaware that the pandemic would void them all only one month later.

First complications…

Unaware of the many restrictions that were to come, the project partners kicked off their project with a meeting in Brussels in February 2020. They planned trainings and workshops across Europe on how to work with volunteers, to reduce disaster risk or to prepare for emergencies. These were then to be replicated by partners in their respective countries.

But only one month later the corona pandemic thwarted all plans and activities needed to be revised. Face-to-face meetings were no longer possible as global travel restrictions kept workers confined at home. This made it difficult for partners to organise in-persons meetings even inside their own countries. In addition, Caritas Armenia was facing the additional challenge of war, with new hostilities erupting in Nagorno-Karabakh in September 2020.

… and solutions

And yet the project partners found solutions. Instead of meeting face-to-face, Caritas organisations met online and learned how to organise capacity building remotely. In the end, this allowed for the inclusion of additional Caritas organisations that would otherwise not have been able to participate. Armenian Caritas workers continued their organisational development in the fields of DRR and volunteer management, in parallel to the relief activities implemented for the persons displaced from Nagorno-Karabakh.

The project partners also found other innovative ways of working together through developing online trainings. Caritas Romania developed a short introduction for Caritas volunteers, which was also adopted and translated by other Caritas agencies. Another successful collaboration was the development of the online training for children about natural disaster and how to prevent them, available in five languages.

A focus on volunteering

Being funded by the European Commission’s EU Aid Volunteers (EAUV) initiative, the focus of the project laid on volunteering and on preparing Caritas to deploy European volunteers. In a training on volunteer management (June 2020), the partners gained experience on how to select, train and manage volunteers. They then prepared the relevant policies, and by 2021, all but one partner had become certified to either send or host EU Aid Volunteers.

Disasters and emergencies

A second pillar of the project was DRR and emergency preparedness. In online trainings in November 2020 and June 2021, the project partners learned methods to involve local communities in assessing and addressing disaster risk. Subsequently most partners implemented the pilot projects “Make Your Caritas Centre Safe” – bringing together staff and children to identify disaster risks in each centre and ways to mitigate them.

The project also offered the possibility for partner organisations to meet and exchange on humanitarian issues. In March 2021, Caritas Austria and Caritas Europa visited Caritas Bosnia and Herzegovina for a peer exchange.

The partners also worked on their emergency plans and procedures. This process internal to each organisation consists in preparing an organisation to be ready to react when faced with an emergency (natural disaster, conflict, other). This process was highly valuable for Caritas Ukraine, which made their emergency plan as part of the ABC-EUAV project in autumn 2021, and therefore was much better prepared when the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022.

Another war testing the partners

The war in Ukraine was another great challenge for the consortium. Caritas Ukraine and Caritas Romania, among others, have been providing large-scale humanitarian assistance in Ukraine and Romania. Despite the humanitarian catastrophe triggered by the war, the partners have continued their organisational development through trainings on accountability and learning in Sarajevo and communication in emergencies in Belgrade. Another highly relevant training focussed on psychosocial and trauma support,  organised in Gyumri, Armenia and later replicated in May for a group of Caritas Ukraine psychologists working with highly traumatised persons.

With the end of ABC-EUAV and the EU Aid Volunteers initiative, Caritas now turns to other possibilities to continue its promotion of humanitarian volunteering – through the European Solidarity Corps and other initiatives.

The project unfortunately ended on a sorrowful note when Jovana Lončarević from Caritas Serbia passed away. She was a driving force behind the disaster risk reduction activities in the consortium, in Serbia and in Caritas. With these few words we want to acknowledge the inpiration that Jovana was to so many of us, and we would like to dedicate this project to her memory. She will be missed, dearly.