GLOBAL VOLUNTEER FOR YOUTH

Historically, as AIESEC in Belgium, we have focused on Global Volunteer, our best and most attractive product for the Belgian youth, since 2015. After COVID-19, there was a need to bring the program back to its sustainability, given many exchanges didn’t come to be because of travel restrictions, which resulted in a big wave of refunding those who couldn’t participate in their exchanges.

The first half of our experience as a national board was focused on working on the sustainability of Global Volunteer to earn the possibility of rerunning it as AIESEC in Belgium. So, from the start, the Local Committees had to focus on the professional internships (Global Talent and Global Teacher), while the national board would focus on building a change management plan and risk assessment which can be found here

This Year

Even though the “old” Global Volunteer framework was not sustainable globally, the changes guaranteed a lower risk for the AIESEC entities that went through the socalled “Resumption Process”. So that is why for our second semester, we were able to run the product once again in our local offices.

Our guidelines as a national member committee were thus to completely halt operations for the program until the study of sustainability was done and the changes necessary to run the program again were done. The Local Committees struggled in the beginning since most of the University partnerships they had were focused on the market of Global Volunteer, but understanding that we must guarantee quality before prioritizing results, all Local Committees were onboard with the decision and also went through a similar process called “Local Resumption”, built by the Member Committee (national board).

Even though we didn’t focus on the product, we noticed that many students were interested in going abroad to volunteer and were signing up organically on our platform. Those were approached to be processed later, after the resumption process.

Jumping to the second semester, after all Local Committees passed the resumption process, we started running the program again, but with a clear gap in knowledge that was not retained or well-transitioned because of the semester gap, as well as a continuity gap with our main international partners for the product.

Another important point to mention about this year is that all entities went through the resumption process, not only AIESEC in Belgium. This is important because the new framework changed the supply of opportunities, process time, and acceptance percentage per application worldwide. This restricted the number of partners we could manage this year as well as the overall number of opportunities for the Summer Peak.

Change Management On The Product

After all the changes to make the product more sustainable, having it working again for a semester and building capacity in the local committees, and analyzing the results for the program in the past years, it became clear that Global Volunteer should become the sole primary focus for the local offices. This was translated into an Organizational Development Model (ODM) that is based primarily on the results of said program before being able to run any other professional programs. So we are changing from the first semester, when the Global Talent program was the only one run, to a second semester in which we focused on rebuilding product knowledge and worked with both products with the same priority.

The following steps we leave for our successors are to keep alive the transition ODM and have clear strategies to support the local committees in the challenge of making their offices sustainable once again with only the results of Global Volunteer.

Our Local Committees

Currently, there are 6 Local Committees, but in the second semester of 2021, because of merges, there were nine directors (responsible for sales of exchanges to the Belgian youth) selling the product in those six different offices, which meant that some were in exploring the same Market (even though they were various universities). So one of the main battles for the first semester of 2022 was to have one person per Local Committee, or at least to have them more specialized per product and not per university. So now we have only one person responsible for sales in each office.

Even though most University Relations partnerships are focused on the professional products, there are a lot of different opportunities in Belgium for new partnerships that contemplate the volunteer projects. One Good Case that we have is AIESEC in Gent, which has had a defined partnership with a clear goal of realizations for Global Volunteer. Now, after a semester of resumption, we must focus on building these long-lasting relationships that will empower our membership and boost our results.

By focusing better on exploring the correct markets, overall product awareness, and information management, we believe in having built the knowledge necessary and the foundation for the next generation to have more results.

The future of Global Volunteer

It is important to see the best future for our organization, in the short and long terms, based on the global reality and changes around us. Global Volunteer has undergone numerous changes to adapt to our new situation and post-pandemic reality. For that, we believe that Global Volunteer has the potential to become even more relevant than in past years for AIESEC in Belgium, bringing an even greater impact.

Historically, as AIESEC in Belgium, we focused on Global Volunteer or shortterm internships abroad for 6 to 12 weeks in start-ups. After COVID-19, there was a need to bring the program back to its sustainability, given many exchanges didn’t come to be because of travel restrictions, which resulted in a big wave of refunding those who couldn’t participate in their exchanges.