The Bona Fides Association was founded in 2003 in Katowice. Association is an independent, nonprofit and politically un-involved non-government organisation. In the beginning of its activity, Bona Fides was realising aid,educational and cultural ventures, aiming in children and young people development in all areas. In 2004 Association joined forces with the Katowice Civil Group (KGO), which was aiming in education in the human rights area focusing on civil rights, increasing of the public information access, public spending control and counteracting for corruption in public institutions. After several years of working on such different projects members of the association decided to focus their efforts on watchdog activity. Since 2008 association is mainly focused on its watchdog activity plus it works as an organisation which is sending young people as volunteers abroad as part of the Youth in Action Programme as well as host EVS volunteers from different countries.
The Bona Fides Association has got an extensive experience in realization Youth in Action projects. We’ve send a lot of volunteers abroad on a variety kinds of projects to different countries (EU countries or Programme Countries and Neighbouring Partner Countries). All of our young volunteers had the opportunity to take part in ecological projects, archeology and cultural reconstruction projects, work with children as well as with disable peoples etc. Our contact and previous cooperation with all of the organizations till now is in very good condition, that’s way we think that this cooperation with will be good and successful as well. We have experience with preparing volunteers to their voluntary work in different country, culture – we always prepare them for cultural shock and we explain that the reality of another country can be very different than our. We’ve always supported and monitored volunteers before, during and after the EVS activities, arranged insurance of volunteers, assisted the volunteers with international travel arrangements, visa requirements, stay connected with NA. We have also sophistication in providing administrative things of all project and quality support to Hosting Organization.
For now we are working together on preparation of the project and stay in constant e-mail and phone contact. All issues regarding the project have been discussed and all of the ambiguities was clarified.
We have in organization 2 EVS coordinators. One of them has worked in Association Bona Fides since 2012 and our second coordinator join to her in 2015, but he has got an external experiance with EVS projects . Both of them have had occasion to coordiante plenty of projects, count in this sending volunteers abroad as well as host them in our organization.Both of them prepare projects for deadlines, deal with the administrative side of projects as well as division of responsibilities for volunteers. Yearly our coordinators prepare and send abroad around 35-40 volunteers for youth exchanges, EVS projects, work camps and other non-formal education activities and take care of 6 our EVS – volunteers, hosted in our organization each year.