Hi, my name is Romy and I am one of the founders of the Muses foundation.
The Muses foundation was set up after my volunteer experience in Guatemala.
I met Jurrien in Guatemala and we both noticed that there were many volunteers who wanted to make a contribution but didn’t really know how to.
After doing some research, we found out that only a few volunteers were professionally trained before starting on their volunteer work. This had to change!
In 2012 I gave the first preparation training to a group of volunteers. More and more organisations became enthusiastic and they started to see the benefits. They saw a clear difference between volunteers who were trained by Muses and volunteers who were not. Since then Muses has trained an average of 800 volunteers yearly.
At Muses we wanted to prove the impact of our work. So in 2016 we received funding to measure the impact of our training. Two years of research, with several notable researchers in charge, many students, and hundreds of volunteers who cooperated, has led to a very valuable impact study.
This is how a huge database of knowledge and experiences came about. Based on this database we developed the website Route 2 Volunteer to help and prepare future volunteers.
Many volunteers who were trained by Muses indicated that they came into situations where they saw volunteers from other countries struggling. We decided to scale up our training in order to reach volunteers from other countries apart from the Netherlands. And this is how this e-learning programme came about!
We believe that this programme can contribute to increasing the impact of volunteers worldwide. We want to give every volunteer a fantastic experience, where everyone makes a sustainable contribution to the local projects.
