The Service Civil International (SCI) is an international volunteer organisation and peace movement founded in 1920. It has more than 40 branches worldwide. The organisation’s main aim is to help local communities and societies by organizing international volunteering projects and gathering volunteers from all around the world.
Pierre Cérésole, a Swiss engineer, organised the first camp after the First World War in Verdun, a small French village, to restore the damages after the war. The participants were German, French, Swiss, and English.
Even though now the opportunities are wider and more, the basic principles have not changed. Nowadays, you can choose many alternatives all around the world for how to join the volunteering and the local communities with an international company through either a long or a short project.
SCI represents many values. Útilapú Hálózat represents and protects these same values during its everyday work. Among SCI’s values one can find that during the volunteering with mutual cooperation in a civil society, we can achieve a non-violent change while we protect the importance of human rights by respecting each other and the environment, accepting our fellow beings and raising people’s awareness to the fact that they can live together with mutual respect, without conflict and in peace.