The 2025 Development Education Series for Volunteer-Sending Agencies (VSAs) will run throughout May & June as a four-part online offering.
The 2025 Development Education Series for Volunteer-Sending VSAs will spotlight the newly relaunched E-TICK, Comhlámh’s online course on ethical communication. For those of us involved in volunteering and development, storytelling is an important part of our work. The Comhlámh Code of Good Practice emphasises that our approaches to communication should uphold the privacy, dignity, and security of all the people we work with.
Globally, dehumanising narratives are becoming increasingly common. Through this offering, we are seeking to respond to the need to build up our capacity to navigate the turbulent world we live in and acknowledge our responsibility to step up, learn, and reflect on our own practice.
This series will be helpful for anyone active in volunteering and development, especially those involved in storytelling and narrative shaping. This might include your work recruiting and training volunteers, how you develop communications output, and how you support volunteers to make meaning of their experiences. It will provide a space for self-focus, creating opportunities for curiosity, exploration and discovery. These sessions will also be helpful for those looking to embed the E-Tick course within their volunteer training offering.
We strongly encourage attendance by a wide range of people from across Volunteer Sending Agencies, including board members and active volunteers. Please feel free to share the registration link with colleagues, team members. There will be room for all!
Sessions will take place from 11.00 – 12.30 on four dates in May and June and will be hosted by the Comhlámh Training and Education team. Before each session, participants are asked to complete two modules from the E-TICK course – these modules are self-guided and can be completed in your own time*. Rolling sessions will then function as an “E-TICK Club”, where participants share their learning journeys with the modules.
*Please allow 60-90 minutes for each two-module set. The course can be accessed by registering at the E-TICK – Ethical Communications website.
- Session 1 (modules 1 and 2), 1st May, 11.00 – 12.30
- Session 2 (modules 3 and 4), 15th May, 11 – 12.30
- Session 3 (modules 5 and 6), 29th May, 11 – 12.30
- Session 4 (modules 7 and 8), 12th June, 11 – 12.30
Please note, as part of our work on our ethical communications, we will be offering a follow-up ‘opt-in’ opportunity later in the year. This will support participants, as part of a peer group with others, in using what they have learned from E-TICK to explore how to progress and work on ethical communications within their own organisation.
The 2025 Dev Ed Series is being delivered as part of the work of the Rethinking International Volunteering Network, a training network led by Comhlámh as part of the Wheel’s Training Links 2024 – 2026 programme. This network aims to strengthen individual and collective values-led approaches within the Comhlámh community.
