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Community Project Volunteers is a partnership program between community involved development and volunteers. These volunteers maybe from any of the following; T.A. Marryshow Community College (TAMCC) community service projects, SGU Dept. of Humanities and Social Sciences, CSR volunteers or volunteer travel programs.
Volunteers must be mindful that community development will be multidisciplinary and require the involvement, facilitation and/or reporting of other stakeholders. Please note that your host will be the community and/or agency who will be guiding and facilitating your input.
Communities and agencies are urged to engage in a 3 day, good governance education workshop and a 4 day engagement of the geo-development process workshop to vision and document their projects and aspirations. The projects listed are visioned in the geo-development process.
Please click here to sign up as a volunteer.
Ensuring benefits to communityWhen evaluating a project put forward by a community group, the first assessment that should be made is to see if this project would benefit more from direct financing and the work done by the local community, rather than volunteers from abroad.
It must also be assessed as to whether the project needs funding at any stage, as well as the free skills and time offered by the volunteers. This must be built into the project from the start to ensure viability.
Projects’ time-frame must be long enough to provide full benefits to the host community.
Consecutive volunteers or groups of volunteers may work on the same project. Different kinds of opportunities can be evaluated and specified to suit different stages of a project.
Time must be allowed for assessment and any necessary changes before the engagement of a new group.
Communication strategies must be put in place to allow seamless transitions between consecutive groups.
New volunteers need to be able to communicate with and ask pertinent questions of the old volunteers and the local community.
Systems must be put in place to ensure that volunteer support lasts the entire length of the project.
Projects must have built-in adaptation strategies from the beginning so that any unexpected decline in volunteer tourists are catered for.
Do you have a community project? You need volunteer assistance
Volunteers from Abroad
There is a subtle difference in the definitions of ‘volunteer travel’ and ‘volunteer tourism’.
The former relates to traditional forms of volunteering abroad and normally involves an extensive period of time, e.g. six months to a year.
Volunteer tourists are likely to spend a shorter amount of time, like a regular tourist, e.g. two weeks.
The latter tourists may be easier to attract, especially if their volunteering is combined with time for leisure and sightseeing, but it will be more difficult to attract the relevant skills with such a short time period and lesser commitment to the project. A combination of the two would be optimum.
Ensuring local community ownership and buy-in
It is important that local community members and volunteers work together. It should be required that the local community spend a certain amount of time, and maybe money, to ensure that they feel that the project is theirs, and understand the level of commitment necessary in order to continue the project successfully. There may need to be set ratio or percentage of time that the local community must contribute to the project while the volunteers are here. It must be decided if the beneficiaries of the project have to earn the benefits in any way.
A buddy system is suggested, linking the volunteers with the local community member and technical expertise, so that the volunteer has support in understanding local cultural norms & national development plans and policies, for the successful planning, development and implementation of the projects.
Because local community members may have family and paid job commitments, then preference may be given to those, who if they have the relevant skills,knowledge and personality to be a buddy, would be otherwise unemployed.
This may also have the desired side-effect of giving young unemployed people free job skills training that they can use to further themselves and development in their local communities. There may need to be a set of guidelines for selection of a buddy, and training and further evaluation may be needed to ensure that they can offer the volunteer the support that they need. It has to be decided what the exact roles and responsibilities of the buddies are.
Monitoring and Evaluation
There must be a monitoring and evaluation system put in place to measure the impact of the project at any given stage. Through the communities' participation in the geo-development process and guideline, a M&E can be fleshed out. A blog is provided for the reporting of projects before, during and after development. All reports will also be shared with local media and hosted on a community management website. The community partnerships and stakeholders can work with our online Monitoring and Evaluation template to assist in guiding through a process to envision a M&E Plan.
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