The article is an attempt to answer the question if volunteering can be a way of work on yourself. Analysis of self-education and volunteering was made based on the literature and my own experience of involvement in volunteering. Successively were analyzed issues such as – the decision to work on ourselves, goal setting, action planning, activity and self-auditing and auto-correction.

The aim of this article is to present circumstances of South american schools functioning in disadvantaged societies on the examples of brazil and peru. Those local societies have been struggling with social and educational poverty, illiteracy, ethnic conflicts, pressures connected with gangs’ activities, etc. in many cases they try to solve their problems on the basis of school which is the center of social activity. These issues are little known in poland and only from literature and journalistic writing what has created their stereotyped image. Meanwhile, you cannot overestimate pedagogical implications of this phenomenon.

The expectations of South american local societies are in many cases not the same as the expectations of school defined by creators and administrators of the education system. Pressures and conflicts usually are caused by discrepancy between the activities of the central institutions and the needs (expectations) of different ethnic groups, clans, families and individuals. Students speaking dialects or the languages of ethnic minorities, normally experiencing domestic violence and forced to work on the border of law, are regarded by the education system as the others/aliens. in such a situation the assistance comes from volunteers and professional educators working for non-governmental organizations. Many of them refer to the ideas taken from Freire’s ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’. he was convinced that a man will never be free alone and his hope of freedom lies in education realized in cooperation with the others. The condition of liberating the oppressed individuals and groups from treating themselves as inferior, powerless, dependent on the others’ support ( which is typical for disadvantaged communities) is, according to paulo Freire, obtaining a new level of awareness through, among others, participating in educational projects based on the idea of social dialogue and creating the feeling of independence, elf-responsibility and co-responsibility for their own community.

In reflection, which is the basis of the above article, i am trying to answer the following question: in what circumstances a school can be a place of social dialogue and fulfilment of basic expectations of disadvantaged communities members? i assume that even in such exotic societies as Latin american countries you can find a lot of inspiration for solving problems similar to those encountered in poland.

As the Thai people have been more aware of the importance of volunteering, the structure of volunteer activities in the country’s hospitals has become more complicated. As a result, medical personnel and volunteer organizations have faced challenges in connecting people with the activities most relevant to concerns and needs. In order to assist the host parties as well as individual volunteers, a system that can match the personal characteristics of volunteers to the demands of the activities needs to be developed. As a starting point, multidimensional scaling was used in this study to reveal a working structure for volunteer activities by exploring major dimensions underlying the similarity and dissimilarity between these activities. Twenty-three volunteer activities proposed by a panel of experts and stakeholders were subject to an ordinal (non-metric) multidimensional scaling. All but one volunteer activity can be grouped along three dimensions: hospital-related, lecturing versus group leading, and empathic communication. These three dimensions can serve as a blueprint for identifying personal characteristics that may be essential to each activity and for designing a system for volunteer recruitment and placement.

Biodiversity conservation cannot operate in Central Eastern European countries without a well-established monitoring system, that is dependent on the citizen scientists input. Here we analyse, based on a Polish case: (1) The contribution of NGOs to the national nature monitoring scheme and their collaboration with governmental and scientific institutions and (2) the motivation of citizen scientists to volunteer for NGOs’ monitoring activities. The study comprises a focus group interview, 30 in-depth interviews with coordinators, citizen scientists, experts and a 23 days long participant observation of a model NGO. We have assessed the monitoring input of NGOs as being a contributory factor influencing the biodiversity conservation effectiveness. The cooperation between governmental, scientific institutions and NGOs exists, but is dependent on national funding. Although NGOs highlight the lack of coherence in monitoring methodology, they are willing to join the biodiversity monitoring, especially at the European Ecological Network – Natura 2000 sites. On the other hand the trust concerning cooperation with citizen scientists is limited. However, despite this, they still turned out to be trustworthy partners. The most effective way to maintain cooperation with citizen scientists is to create a bond in a group and to provide them with the opportunity to develop their passion for nature. Our findings have shed light on the growing importance of citizen scientists in biodiversity governance, providing recommendations for development of the effective monitoring schemes based on the volunteer work of citizen scientists.