Caritas India shall adopt the volunteering approach as a practical way to reach out to the most marginalized sections by enabling people and the communities to play a more active role in development to leverage ownership, participation, empowerment and inclusion. Through this approach, the people, the organization and the community shall benefit. Caritas India intends to bring a fresh perspective, expand diversity, provide leadership, advocate for the causes and create an environment for the people that care about their communities.

Volunteerism being one of the Key Strategic Pillars of the organisation focuses on mobilizing, engaging and retaining volunteers regularly. Through this approach, Caritas India also tends to offer an opportunity to be the transforming agent by associating with Caritas India as Caritas Samaritans.

In recent times, the unprecedented crisis in Kerala brought out a truly unprecedented response from the people of Kerala. Local citizens from all sectors of work and from all walks of life volunteered themselves to launch a massive rescue operation to evacuate people to safer places or relief camps. Preparedness is one of the key aspects of disaster management. Caritas India along with its partner organisations chose to train a cadre of volunteers as first responders for any forthcoming disaster and work on resilience building of communities under the program “Navjeevan”.

4650 volunteers were identified across 31 dioceses in Kerala to be trained on social media communication and individual fundraising. A series of 31 trainings began on 2^nd September 2021 to 22^nd September 2021. Each training began with Fr Paul Moonjely, Executive Director, Caritas India addressing the volunteers. Fr Paul in his welcome messages highlighted the attributes of a true volunteer as Love, Compassion and Empathy. He also welcomed all the volunteers as Caritas Samaritans and expressed his gratitude to the partner organisations and volunteers for agreeing to be a volunteer with Caritas India. The training sessions began with participants being motivated on the importance of volunteering followed by a session on individual fundraising. The second session focused on the usage of social media to mobilize resources digitally. The session also focused on exploring different features available on different social media handles.

As part of the Navjeevan program, Caritas India also collaborated with the Kerala Catholic Youth Movement to enrol their registered youth members as Caritas Samaritans. Caritas India proposes to engage the youth members of KCYM as Caritas Samaritans. This association will accelerate the mission of KCYM of engaging the youth in the service of the poor as they shall be regularly engaged in activities which shall be in service of the marginalised. The collaboration shall also contribute to reaching the goal envisaged with respect to volunteering within the organisation. A series of four orientations and training was organized for volunteers on Caritas India volunteering and Volunteer Portal registration.

The trained volunteers shall be reaching out to individuals through different activities for resource mobilization. As part of follow up, regular meetings shall be organized with the volunteer leaders to map the contribution of each volunteer engaged.