19 rue de Paris
35500 Rennes
France
- International/Cultural relations
BeVolunteer is the legal organisation running BeWelcome and is registered as a non-profit association in Rennes, France, since November 2006. The General Assembly and the Board of Directors are the official organs of BeVolunteer. Promoting the idea of hospitality by providing the BeWelcome website is the main object of the association.
BeWelcome lets you share a place to stay, connect with travellers, meet up and find accommodation on your journey. It is and will always be a free, open source, non for profit, democratic community.
Our mission is to provide a platform for hospitality and culture exchange and to manage the volunteers involved. The safety of our members and their privacy is our main concern.
With members from many different countries and cultural backgrounds we highly value the challenge and opportunity to learn from each other and openly listen to different opinions, critics and suggestions.
For us the "how" of working together is of key importance and our work style is reflected in our work ethics and organisational values. It is our desire and measure of success to be seen as an organisation where members work together in an enriching, democratic, innovative, friendly and motivating way.
Our principal aim is the volunteer management and project development of BeWelcome, a community - platform which promotes hospitality and cultural exchange.
In order to reach this aim we have four objectives:
1) to establish a democratic work environment
We want to benefit from the advantages of a democratic organisation as democracy guarantees many of our organisational values. To make sure the democracy works well we want to follow the principle of subsidiarity: discussions, decisions and actions are done on organizational levels only as high as necessary but as low as possible, i.e. individuals first, then teams, then Board of Directors (BoD), then General Assembly (GA). So the best way to describe our structure is neither a representative nor a basic democracy, but a participative one.
2) to build a transparent organisation
For active volunteer contribution we want to be as transparent as possible. For this we want to make organisational data such as our statutes, the general assembly minutes and our financial statement publicly available. We will openly communicate with you through this wiki page (our library), the forum (our discussion place), news blogs and whatever you suggest us to do.
3) to encourage active member participation
Without our members we are nothing. They are the reason why this organisation exists. We are aware of that and want to show you the benefits of volunteer participation. We want to support and welcome all kinds of volunteers; some very idealistic, others more pragmatic and work oriented.
4) to build a reliable legal and organisational structure
It is important that our members and volunteers can freely contribute without having to worry about legal issues or getting lost in the organisational structure. Our last objective therefore is to provide the legally secure workplace and encourage you not only to understand the different organisational bodies but also to participate in them - if you want.
BeWelcome has over 140,000 members in nearly every country across the globe. Given its volunteer led, the non-profit s based on Collective work. Volunteers from many different cultural backgrounds and countries working together, using the same tools and following the rules of the organisation . We really believe that this is a perfect start to create many great projects and to follow our ambitious dreams. None of us would have the capability to either envisage or realize that project. We hope that we can join network members in grant applications.
Since BeWeclome is centered on cross-cultural exchange, we want to join the network to open dialogue with civil society partners in other countries. We hope that other members can join and use our global hospitality exchange system, so as to promote intercultural understanding and dialogue regardless of ethnicity, race, gender and sexual orientation.