Welcome to the website of CESVOPAS, the Study Center on Volunteering and Social Engagement.

By constantly promoting local, national and international research, the Center is a point of reference for an increasingly prepared, in-depth and appropriate interpretation of these two phenomena which involve all generations and all segments of the population, intercept all needs (expressed, unexpressed and emerging), bring social issues to the attention of institutions, and generate changes by small but constant gestures in the lives of all people.

By combining the rigor of research and the concreteness of operators in the field, CESVOPAS also intends to be a partner and interlocutor for associations, organizations and citizens who engage in volunteering and participation, to intercept trends and orientations, but also to support reflection, training, and progressive change, with an underlying idea of University as a generative actor and a resource for the territory.

Volunteering and social engagement are productive research contexts for pedagogy: they are experiential by nature and they are congruent with aims of education such as human growth of individuals and communities. At CESVOPAS, research and construction of tools and practices (either academic or operative) are conducted in interdisciplinary dialogue, while seeking and preserving a pedagogical focus. Across the different contexts that are taken into consideration – such as youth volunteering, youth dwelling, intergenerational care in volunteering, blood donation – CESVOPAS analyzes learning, care and growth processes, achieving insights that are useful for an updated general and social pedagogy; education, by incorporating the logics of volunteering and social engagement, gets enriched and evolves; this happens for example in service-learning. On the other way around, volunteering and social organizations need rigorous pedagogical research to be able to respond to transformative and “assimilative” requests, for example the push to rethink their own activities in terms of skills and competencies.