DURING two day in June, volunteers across Slovakia will combine forces within Our Town, or Naše Mesto, the biggest corporate volunteering event in Slovakia.

Volunteers can select from hundreds of manual labour activities but can also devote their time to seniors or the disabled. This year the event will take place on June 13 and 14 in 14 towns across Slovakia. “Immediately after we launched the registration… 1,300 volunteers registered over a few hours,” said Lucia Borovská from the Pontis Foundation, which is organising the event, as cited by the SITA newswire. Also, this year the volunteers will paint fences, do gardening work in parks and kindergartens, repair castle ruins, remove illegally dumped trash, or share their knowledge and skills with people from NGOs.

This year volunteers can join a whole-day reading event at the primary school on Sibírska Street in Bratislava. Something new this year will be the Creative Marathon in Bratislava’s Connect centre, where participating promotion and communications agencies will help NGOs. See DAYS pg 12 DAYS: Volunteers joining forces Continued from pg 9 The number of volunteers as well as activities from which volunteers can choose increases every year. In 2013, more than 6,000 employees in 11 towns joined the volunteering event. Since 2007, 100 companies and almost 14,400 volunteers who worked 55,719 hours joined the event.

They worked on improvements of seven castle grounds, 265 parks, 60 playgrounds, five shelters for the homeless and two animal shelters. They also painted 15 kilometres of fences of schools and kindergartens, among other activities.