VC awarded Comprehensive Compliance Award to the Comhlámh Code of Good Practice for Volunteer Sending Agencies.
Viatores Christi is delighted to announce that it has retained it’s Comprehensive Compliance Award which officially recognises those signatories to the Comhlámh Code of Good Practice for Volunteer Sending Agencies (CoGP) that have successfully passed an externally evaluated audit around compliance to the Code of Good Practice.
The Comhlámh CoGP for Volunteer Sending Agencies is a set of standards for organisations involved in facilitating international volunteer placements in developing countries. VC has been recognised as being committed to introducing and maintaining appropriate policies and practices to ensure that it is operating according to identified best practice in the field of international volunteering.
The CoGP which was developed in 2005 by Irish volunteer sending agencies (VSAs), returned volunteers and a range of partners that host international volunteers.
Organisations that are signatories to the code have shown a commitment to 11 principles of an effective international volunteering and are working towards implementing these principles in their programmes.
Adherence to the CoGP ensure overseas volunteering has a positive impact for the three main stakeholders: the volunteer, the sending agency, and the local project and community.
The CoGP has also been recognised as international best practice – in a piece on the ethics of voluntourism, The Guardian newspaper in January 2016 investigated the area of regulation and standards in the overseas volunteering sector and wrote that ‘The highest-regarded set of guidelines, though, is the Code of Good Practice for Volunteer-Sending Organisations (CoGP) developed by Comhlamh, an Irish organisation’.
Prospective volunteers who hope to volunteer with VC can be assured that the programmes are designed and delivered in keeping with the principles and indicators of the code. Compliance with the core indicators and particularly the comprehensive compliance standards of the CoGP show that VC operates at the highest standard globally for international volunteering.
