A committed community of volunteers
Regular hosts of major events, Innsbruck and the Tirol region continue to be well served by a volunteer network and ethos developed when the city staged its two Olympic Winter Games.
Since hosting the Olympic Games, the city and region have staged many major sporting competitions. Recent events include the 2012 Winter Youth Olympic Games (YOG), the 2016 International Children’s Winter Games (ICG), the 2018 UCI Road World Championships and the 2020 Winter World Masters Games. Innsbruck and Tirol have also organised a series of other world championships across a number of sports, as well as major cultural and business events. Innsbruck has become, for example, a renowned conference venue.
To staff these events and ensure they are a success, Innsbruck and Tirol rely on a network of 1,200 motivated volunteers, both new and experienced. Nearly 1,400 volunteers were on duty at the 2012 Winter YOG, and 442 when the world’s top road cyclists came to the region in 2018.
New technologies are now being used to attract younger volunteers, who are encouraged to play their part in events through a dedicated platform called the Volunteer Team Tirol project. Rolled out in November 2020 and a legacy of the 2012 Winter YOG, it invites participants to sign up and create their own profiles.
As well as informing them about upcoming events for which they can register, the project provides volunteers with certificates confirming the work they have done, which can be of use in their education and professional careers. It also organises volunteer meet-ups and gatherings. Volunteer Team Tirol has its roots in the volunteer platform launched ahead of the 2016 ICG.
Some 60 per cent of the project’s volunteers are women, and two-thirds are students. Seventy-five per cent of them live in Austria and the remainder in 40 countries around the world, with nearly 30 languages covered.
Thirty of the volunteers who helped out at the 2012 YOG were veterans of both the city’s Olympic Winter Games, held in 1964 and 1976.
The Organising Committee for the 1976 Games made the most of the experience and expertise of the volunteers on duty in 1964. They brought their organisational skills to bear in areas such as administration, finance, traffic management, ticketing, accommodation, press and advertising, drawing on everything they had learned 12 years earlier. The use of these experienced volunteers also helped keep personnel costs low.