We at Citizens of Europe believe that volunteering is an essential dimension of civil society and a functional democracy. On the one hand it is of extreme importance for NGOs to keep their activities. On the other hand it promotes volunteers’ participation and self development.We have embraced this cause during the last 4 years and after our experience with volunteers from different backgrounds we must say that we are very happy with the experience and we want to keep it so. Therefore we salute the International Volunteer Day (IVD). In order to valorise volunteering Citizens of Europe is currently running the project v11 in the framework of the European Year of Volunteering 2011. The first activity was an Open Forum last weekend in Bruges (Belgium). Check this page in the following days to read a small report on what we discovered over there…