The aim of the project “Volunteer! …through road safety.” is to test an approach, to study the advantages and disadvantages and to develop a European model of making an informed choice on whether to organize a one time volunteer action or a full scale volunteer campaign, given different circumstances and desired effect, built on peer-to-peer communication and promoting civic participation. The project will address not only the question “What is it to be a volunteer?” but it will give concrete answers on the more important ones: “Why to be a volunteer?” and “How to be a volunteer?”. The specific objectives are:

• existing knowledge dissemination: The project partners’ experience will be used to:
  • develop and use modern technologies for attracting the young people’s attention and focusing it to volunteer activities with large social impact, i.e. we will develop special web space for the project, short cartoon movies and we will use driving console and alcogoggles;
  • train 120 volunteer youth leaders in 12 trainings as multipliers in carrying out successful people-to-people actions;
  • involve directly 1800 citizens in the twelve local field actions, organized by the volunteer youth leaders and to reach at least 18 000 more through the paper materials distributed during them, 50 000 people through the website and 50 000 reached through media;

• knowledge generation: During the project we will organize a one time action in Bulgaria and another one in Belgium to test the transnational viability of the approach. Those will be evaluated separately. The one time event in Bulgaria will serve as a pilot action for a full scale ten actions campaign to be carried out later in the project. TOP-25 as an independent project evaluator will develop a method to assess the advantages and disadvantages of organizing either a one time volunteer action or a full scale campaign. This will include study visits during the field actions, questionnaires for the volunteers and for the participants and evaluation of the results – both qualitative and quantitative. All findings will serve as basis for producing an evaluation report and a multimedia presentation.
• new knowledge dissemination: Based on the findings TOP-25, together with the project partners, will develop and disseminate recommendations to their international network, describing the advantages and disadvantages of organizing either a one time volunteer action or a full scale campaign, and what is best in different circumstances for organizations with different capacity. Furthermore the multimedia presentation will be given during the next European Youth Forum for Road Safety, organized by the European Commission, and to other similar events, focused on organizing volunteer activities.

In the framework of this project "Open Youth" and the Ministry of Health organized the campaign "Choose your way" which is focused at the alcohol abuse and subsequent driving as an example not only of a volunteer campaign but also of a successful cooperation between the civil society and the state institutions.