On 8th and 9^th of September 2020, the Armenia research country workshop has been organized on-line with sixteen local and four remote participants.

The goal of the workshop was to discuss the findings of the international research and national research carried out under the leadership of the Resilience Advisers Network. These findings were put in perspective in order to identify main directions for the elaboration  of a volunteer development plan and cooperation model to be signed between the Communities of Garni and Mets Parni, the Ministry of Emergency Situations of Armenia and the Armenia Red Cross Society.  

The Armenia group was composed of staff members and volunteers of the Armenian Red Cross Society, representatives of the Ministry of Emergency Situations of Armenia, particularly from the Rescue Service, and the Head of Mets Parni and Garni communities. International participants belonged to the Austrian Red Cross and the Resilience Advisers Network.

The Lieutenant Colonel Meliq Asilyan, from MES-A, first presented the information regarding the establishment and development of a public voluntary rescue movement in the territory of the Republic of Armenia. Then the Armenian Red Cross Society and the Austrian Red Cross introduced the main lessons learned from past DRM projects they implemented in the country. 

The following six sessions were organized according to the six processes defined by the capacity building process model selected for the research methodology; Business (B), Customer (C), Integration (I), Operation (O), Delivery (D) and Regulation (R).

During the discussions the following issues were highlighted by the participants:

• Incomplete legal regulations in Armenia on volunteer activities and volunteer work.
• Lack of guarantees for the protection of the health and safety of the volunteers.
• Lack of incentive mechanisms for involving a wider range of civil society in volunteering
• CP system in Armenia includes DRR National Platform
• All the communities have their Annual Disaster Preparedness Plans
• The unit which is going to be established within the framework of the project StrengthVol will be serving not only for the villages where it will be located but also for the other villages which are located in different administrative areas. 

The outputs of the workshop have been used to finalize the Armenia country report and the guiding principles (to upload in the page ‘’resources’’ of this website) and should be used by project team to elaborate the volunteer development plan and cooperation model/cooperation agreement.