The City as a Classroom: Volunteering Programs as Non-Formal Education

At SIPAM, volunteer coordinators from European Capitals of Culture and international cultural programmes argued that volunteering should be understood as a form of non-formal education that can reshape people, institutions and cities.

Every major festival relies on volunteers. They welcome audiences, accompany artists, solve last-minute problems, translate, guide, observe and often hold together the countless human interactions that determine whether an event feels merely efficient or genuinely hospitable. Yet their contribution is still too easily measured in shifts filled and tasks completed, while the deeper value of volunteering remains less visible: the learning that takes place through responsibility, proximity, trust and participation.

This was the premise of “The City as a Classroom: Volunteering Programs as Non-Formal Education,” a panel held on 24 June as part of the Sibiu International Performing Arts Market (SIPAM). Moderated by Cosmin Chivu, Director of the Industry Programme at SIPAM, the conversation brought together Anette Elmiina Eksymä, Volunteer Coordinator at the Oulu Culture Foundation; Faustine Damman, Participation & Civic Engagement Manager at Bourges 2028; Iliyana Atanasova, President and Project Manager of EDU Center NGO; Jaan Ulst, former head of the Tartu 2024 volunteer programme and Cultural and Creative Industries Project Manager at Goethe-Institut Tallinn; Mayumi Taniguchi, Director of the Volunteer Bridge Project; and Violeta Buduleci, Head of the FITS Volunteer Program.

Their experiences stretched from Sibiu’s long-established festival model and Tartu’s recently completed European Capital of Culture year to Oulu’s 2026 programme and the preparations for Bourges 2028. Together, they described volunteering as a civic ecosystem and a learning process: one that develops confidence, autonomy, intercultural understanding and professional skills, but only when institutions are willing to invest in people rather than simply use their availability.

Opening the discussion, Chivu turned attention to the scale of the invisible structure behind a volunteer programme. FITS has welcomed around 500 volunteers this year, but their arrival at the festival is only the final, visible stage of a much longer process. Before the first audience enters a venue, organisers have interviewed applicants, selected teams, delivered training and coordinated accommodation with members of the local community.

“Without volunteer participation, none of this could happen,” Chivu said. “It takes planning, it takes interviewing thousands of applicants, and then it takes the training, which is so important.”

The city itself becomes part of that infrastructure. Since no festival could easily cover accommodation for every international volunteer, families in Sibiu opened their homes. What begins as a logistical solution frequently becomes a relationship, and the educational experience expands beyond the venue into daily life, cultural exchange and friendship.

For Chivu, the learning happens through direct participation. Many FITS volunteers are between 15 and 17 years old and are trained “on the job,” sometimes accompanying prominent guests and observing the work of an international festival at close range. Their roles may be described as shadowing, but they are not passive. They learn how to communicate across cultures, manage uncertainty, assume responsibility and respond when plans change.

The crucial question, therefore, is what the institution creates for them. Buduleci, who began as a volunteer herself and later became the head of the FITS programme, expressed this reversal in one of the clearest principles of the session.

“Each year gives me the opportunity to discover something more or something new,” she said. “In this role, I have understood that, for a festival and for my team, it is very important to start with the question, ‘How can I help the volunteer?’ and not, ‘What can the volunteer do for the festival?’”

That distinction separates a learning programme from a staffing mechanism. It also places responsibility on coordinators to consider the volunteer’s development, emotional safety and sense of belonging alongside the needs of an event.

The willingness to volunteer can appear surprising at a time often described through individualism, economic pressure and declining long-term civic participation. Yet the programmes represented in the panel have not struggled to attract interest. In Bourges, two years before the European Capital of Culture title year, 350 people had already joined the volunteer community.

Damman, who was herself a volunteer in a European Capital of Culture programme before becoming a coordinator, said this early response challenged the warnings she had received.

“I am surprised by how much people want to participate, to volunteer and to give their time to a project that is a European Capital of Culture, a project about developing a territory and speaking with all its citizens,” she said. “Everybody told me it was going to be hard to find volunteers. We are two years away and we already have 350.”

Oulu experienced a similar response. Eksymä had previously trained volunteers for an NGO supporting children, where a group of four or five trainees could feel like a success. When registration opened for Oulu 2026, around 200 people responded in the first round. The programme has since grown to approximately 700 volunteers.

The comparison also revealed a wider shift in volunteering. Many people are less able or willing to commit to the same organisation every week for a full year, but they may be eager to participate in shorter, concentrated opportunities connected to a specific event or cause.

“People might not necessarily want to commit to a voluntary role for years and years,” Eksymä explained. “As a European Capital of Culture, we have the advantage of offering pop-up volunteering opportunities. People can give as much time as they can and want to, in events in which they actually want to participate.”

Damman observed the same change in France, where local associations are finding it increasingly difficult to recruit volunteers for traditional, recurring commitments. Bourges 2028 is therefore combining longer-term involvement with flexible tasks, allowing people to enter the programme at different levels. Her message to hesitant residents is direct: a European Capital of Culture is a rare civic moment that may never return to the same territory in their lifetime.

“At least once, they can participate in this huge project,” she said. “It is a lifetime opportunity. It will not happen again where they live, so I tell them: take the chance.”

This flexibility does not make participation less meaningful. Instead, it recognises that civic engagement must adapt to people’s lives if it wants to remain inclusive.

Recruiting volunteers is only one part of the work. Once people arrive, coordinators must persuade artistic teams, event organisers and institutional partners to trust them with meaningful responsibilities.

For Damman, this is among the most difficult parts of her role. Volunteers may be young, retired, new to culture or professionally experienced in entirely different sectors. None of those characteristics makes them without skills.

“The most challenging part is convincing coordinators and event organisers to trust them,” she said. “It is not because they are amateurs, young, older, or have never worked in the cultural field that they have no competencies or qualities that can help you. They have training. They want very much to be part of it and to help. Trust them.”

Trust is educational in itself. It gives volunteers the chance to test their abilities in real situations, but it also requires institutions to delegate, explain and accept that learning sometimes includes mistakes. If all meaningful decisions remain with paid staff while volunteers are assigned only repetitive or peripheral tasks, the programme cannot credibly present itself as non-formal education.

Mayumi Taniguchi addressed the emotional consequences when that trust and respect are missing. She began volunteering at FITS in 2010 and has now spent 16 years building bridges between Romania and Japan. Her academic background was in criminal law and she once intended to become a lawyer because she wanted to help people. Volunteering revealed another route: supporting younger generations through coordination, encouragement and international exchange.

Her response is to help volunteers recognise the value within themselves, even when an external interaction fails to affirm it. But the observation also exposed the ethical boundary running through the panel: a programme cannot celebrate volunteering as education while tolerating humiliation, invisibility or the replacement of paid professional work with unsupported unpaid labour.

At FITS, the challenge lies less in attracting applicants than in choosing among them. Buduleci said thousands apply, while the programme can accept roughly 550 people. Selection day is one of the hardest moments of the year because every application represents a person who wants to belong.

A bridge between cultures and possible futures

Taniguchi’s own trajectory demonstrates how far the learning initiated by a volunteer experience can travel. Romania and FITS, she said, opened her eyes to discovery and transformation. Cultural differences did not remain obstacles; they became the material through which she grew and eventually learned to transmit the opportunity to others.

International volunteering is valuable not simply because it enlarges a professional network. It creates relationships among people with different academic, artistic, educational and business backgrounds, many of whom would never otherwise share the same working environment.

“Why do we receive international volunteers? It is to create connections, not only business connections or networks,” Taniguchi said. “Everybody has a different background. We create friendships and discuss what we can do next.”

Sibiu offers a particularly visible example of that continuity. Japanese volunteers have formed one of the strongest international groups within the FITS programme, while local host families have turned temporary stays into long-term friendships. Taniguchi herself built a life in Romania, but she resisted presenting transformation as something that must happen immediately or take the same form for everyone.

The question of what survives after a festival or Capital of Culture year produced some of the panel’s most concrete proposals. For Oulu, legacy does not necessarily mean preserving the programme in exactly the same institutional form. It may mean helping trained volunteers find new places in local organisations that urgently need them.

If participants move into NGOs, local events and city initiatives, they carry with them the training, motivation and confidence developed through Oulu 2026. In this model, the programme succeeds partly by allowing its human capacity to circulate.

Jaan Ulst argued that such a legacy must be planned long before the title year. When Tartu began developing its volunteer programme, one of the hardest tasks was imagining the necessary structure three or four years in advance, at the very moment when budgets and teams were being decided but the scale of future activity remained uncertain.

The city becomes a classroom because learning happens everywhere: in theatres and public squares, in host families’ homes, inside municipal meetings, during accessibility workshops, behind the scenes and in the moment when a young volunteer is trusted with a real responsibility. The lesson is reciprocal. Volunteers discover what they can do, while cultural institutions learn what becomes possible when participation is treated as development rather than free labour.

As Chivu concluded, the people coordinating these systems perform work that is both necessary and too rarely acknowledged. The future cultural leaders trained through volunteering may eventually become directors, producers and policymakers. Others will carry the experience into completely different parts of civic life. The most important outcome is that they leave knowing they mattered, that they were trusted and that the city was also theirs to shape.