Financial conditions

We will manage this project according the guidelines of the European Solidarity Corps Programme guide:

In case you will be selected, we will book and pay for your international flight. You will not have any costs for that - regardless the distance band that the European Commission has set and the funding that goes along with that.
We will pick you up in Brussels Airport and bring you as a first welcome to Ghent, where you can meet the staff as a first welcome.

As arranged by the programme, you will receive monthly a lumpsum of pocket money.

We will accompany you for registering in the city administration upon arrival, and when this has been done, we will assist you in opening a Belgian banc account if you don't have an account in Euro-currency. Your pocket money will be monthly transferred to this account, or to your personal account if you have a EURO account and access to it from Belgium.
According to the current standards in the Programme Guide of the ESC, this is 6 € per day.

Similar as the pocket money, we will transfer monthly an amount for food and meals. With this money, you can buy your own ingredients to cook, to buy luch and to manage your own healthy nutritian way of life.

We have looked up average needs of students in Belgium for food and together with the funding National Agency Jint, we have found benchmarks of proper food money amounts, that should do to eat well.
We got inspiration of a good study about that from Beobank.
We will follow this recommendation and provide 330 euro's per month as amount to transfer for food. Our current and previous volunteers always were very satisfied with this amount.

Costs for accomodation will be fully covered by the organisation.

We rent a 2 bed-room apartment, with facilities such as a kitchen, bathroom, internet,… Please take a look into the Pictures-section.

Volunteers have their own sleeping room, but a living room, kitchen, bathroom and small terrace is being shared with the 2 international volunteers.
There is a new washing machine in the apartment, we foresee clean sheets, pillows and clean towels.

It is important to realise that the volunteers will live together in the same apartment.

The project is not only about working between 9 to 5, but includes also a common social life, finding leisure time activities with each other, language learning,...
Volunteers will need to agree with each other upon how to use the kitchen, the dishes, the shopping, the garbage, inviting friends, the volume of the music at home,... so it's much more then only being colleguages at work.

Flights will be arranged by the travel agency we cooperate with for our European trainings and meetings. They are experienced in worldwide travel organisations for business purposes and they provide more services for us than a traditional agency for tourists in case of flight changes, delays, check in’s,...

Ghent is a bike-city. You will find 1000s and 1000s of bikes in the train station, in the city center,...

We will provide you with a bike, what we name a "student bike" (a basic bike that does the job in the city).
With a bike, the city center is less then 5 minutes biking, the office 1 minute.

In case you are not used to ride a bike, we can give you an induction, and there are orgasations in Ghent that give free courses for people that want to learn to ride a bike.

We will enroll the participants to the Henner, insurances foreseen by the European Commission for the ESC programme.
In case something will fall out the scope of this insurance, we also will enroll the participant in the Belgian National Health system, if that makes it easier.

In case you need a Schengen-visa for a long stay, we will initiate the "Single Permit" procedure, which is a combination of a Visa and a permit for doing volunteer work as a non-schengen citizen.

This means you'll need to obtain the background check/certificate of good behaviour, and an official translation of it, a medical check and an official translation of it, and a few other documents.
This procedure usually takes 3 months. Sometimes we split the project in a short term (up to max. 90 days while waiting for the visa) and a long term project when the visa is obtained.

We carry 100% of the costs that occur for the visa/Single Permit procedure.