Get involved with EVEC — find your way in.

Within three working days at the most, whichever way in you write about. Every message is read and answered personally, so if you asked something specific — a date range, a skill you want to use, a route you are unsure about — the reply is about that.

If three working days pass and nothing arrives, write again. A lost message is far likelier than a decision to ignore you.

For as long as the Erasmus+ rules covering your action allow. EVEC does not set durations and will not pretend to: the rules for the Key Action you apply under, and the grant agreement you or your university signs, are what decide the length of a mobility. We are not the ones making those rules — Erasmus+ is.

That is why no number of days or weeks appears anywhere on this page as an EVEC rule. Any figure we invented would be ours rather than the programme's, and you would find out it was wrong at the worst possible moment. Tell us the window you actually have and we build around it. For European Solidarity Corps volunteering, the span quoted in the comparison table above comes from the programme itself.

No. No background is needed in any of them — and in North Macedonia they are only starting, so nobody here expects you to arrive knowing them.

The four methods were developed and piloted by our network in Athens: mycelium means growing material from agricultural waste that would otherwise be burned; microgreens run a full production cycle, seed to harvest, in about ten days; drones start on a simulator and then survey real ground; solar means building small photovoltaic rigs and measuring what they produce. In Kocani we are setting them up now, which makes early volunteers part of the building rather than the audience.

There is no fee to volunteer with EVEC Kocani — locally or online. Neither is paid, and neither costs anything to join.

The funded routes are not one thing, so they cannot honestly share one answer. ESC volunteering is fully EU-funded — travel, accommodation and a monthly allowance are covered under the European Solidarity Corps' own rules. The traineeship route assumes an Erasmus+ grant, at the level set by the current Erasmus+ rules for North Macedonia. Name the route you are considering and you will be told the arrangement that actually applies to it. We will not call a route free when it is not.

No — online volunteering is remote and open to helpers worldwide. Writing, design, social and web work reach us equally well from another city or another continent.

Being here matters for the other routes because that work is done in person — and "here" is wider than one town. EVEC works from Kocani and through branch offices in Stip, Strumica, Delcevo and Lozovo, and because the ESC Quality Label is held by the association rather than by any one office, an ESC placement can be based in any of the five.

Yes. You can volunteer with EVEC Kocani locally if you are under 18, with parental consent, per our safeguarding policy, and online volunteering is open on the same basis. Much of our local work is built around schoolchildren in the first place.

The two funded routes are where age and status start to matter: an Erasmus+ traineeship assumes you are a student already holding a grant, and European Solidarity Corps volunteering starts at 18.

Then ESC specifically is not available to you, and no amount of goodwill on our side changes that — the age band and the residence condition are the European Solidarity Corps' own, not ours to widen.

Nothing else here closes, though. Online volunteering is open to anyone from anywhere, local volunteering welcomes any age if you are in or near Kocani, and the traineeship route turns on student status rather than on age.

Not yet. The Volunteers Academy is a programme from our network that we plan to bring to North Macedonia, and it has not launched here — so there is no enrolment link on this page, on purpose.

If that is the thing you are waiting for, write to contact@evec.org.mk and say so. You will be told, honestly, where it stands — and you will hear from us when it opens.

Yes. All of our offices are active, and we are currently looking for people to volunteer with EVEC Kocani through the European Solidarity Corps. The Quality Label is held by the association, so a placement can be based in any of our five towns — Kocani, Stip, Strumica, Delcevo or Lozovo — and Stip is recruiting most actively right now. If you want to check us on the European Youth Portal first, Kocani, Stip and Strumica each have their own entry there; Delcevo and Lozovo are covered by the association's label rather than a separate listing.

Local and online volunteering have no intake windows at all: they open when you write. Whatever the date on which you are reading this, the message is worth sending.

Our seat is at Ul. Boris Trajkovski 42, 2300 Kocani, but we do not keep fixed public office hours — the team is often out where the work is, in schools and day-care centres. Write first to contact@evec.org.mk and we will arrange a time when someone who knows your route is there to meet you.

Written enquiries are answered within three working days at the most.

A signed certificate and a reference describing what you actually did; articles, designs and campaigns published under your own name rather than filed away as exercises; hands-on experience of communications, events, inclusion and project work inside a working NGO; friends and collaborators across our network in North Macedonia and Greece; and hours that became real activities for young people rather than busywork.

Those are the same five things listed further up the page, and none of them is route-specific.

Check the identifiers rather than the adjectives. EVEC Kocani is a citizens' association founded in 2014, holding an ESC Quality Label for Hosting and Supporting valid to 31/12/2027, with OID E10119353 and PIC 943554018 — verifiable on the European Youth Portal at youth.europa.eu. Our projects carry real reference codes you can look up on the Erasmus+ project results platform — for example 2020-1-MK01-KA102-077700, the VET mobility project we coordinated.

This page prints those numbers twice for exactly that reason: so they can be checked — by you, or by the university or organisation sending you — before anybody asks you for a commitment.

That is exactly what the email below is for, and it is a good message to send. Describe yourself in a few lines — where you are, what you would like to get better at, and roughly when you are free — and you will be told which routes fit and which do not.

Sorting that out is the whole job of this page. There is no obligation, and no route on this page begins with a commitment.