WAVES for Development
WAVES for Development is a nonprofit bringing educational surf and surf voluntourism programming throughout Peru.
WAVES seeks to create positive social change in coastal communities in Peru through youth education and development programs and through surf voluntourism programs that transform the views of travelers on themselves and the world.
WAVES provides the local youth with educational programs, including Environment and English classes, Sports Classes and access to teachers who work in the Lobitos Primary school which complements the available resources of the government-funded school. Additionally, the local youth are provided with three free weekly Surf Classes (including Girls-Only Surf Classes), which include a range of opportunities, from swimming lessons to water safety, beach environment and local hazards. WAVES Also provides the girls with wetsuits, surfboards and other equipment.
Volunteers have the opportunity to assist teachers both in the academic programs and with the Surf School. Additional Surf Voluntourism Programs include Beach Clean Ups and other activities including Surf Photography, Small Business Studies, Construction Programs, Dance Classes, Health Clinics and Art classes, among others.
The values behind their programs are spelled out in their name:
Water – via adventure sports, participants develop a special relationship with the precious resource to which 1.1 billion people around the world lack access. And that relationship can be applied easily to conversation activities in their daily lives.
Adventure – WAVES offers disadvantaged youth access to adventure sports and makes adventure part of their social and personal development. They believe adventure is not just an adrenaline rush but rather a way to build confidence, promote good health and foster meaningful relationships.
Voluntourism – volunteers engage in community service activities while engaging in their passion for surfing. Additionally, voluntourists provide local communities with cultural exchange opportunities and camaraderie through their participation in Educational Surf Programs.
Education – WAVES believes the future success of communities lies in the education of its youth. They therefore help create educational and development opportunities for youth in coastal communities, providing them with the tools to become the leaders of tomorrow.
Sustainability – there are 4 aspects to sustainability: ecological (use of/impacts on/implications for the natural environment), social (the initial participation of the community, impact on their culture and willingness to carry it on), political (the politics of destination and other accountability issues) and economic (the impact of money that exchanges hands).
To learn more about WAVES, including the details on their Voluntourism Program, click here.
The Small Things
The Small Things is a Tanzania-based nonprofit which provides support, education and care for the children, staff and volunteers of the Nkoaranga Orphanage.
Through long-term investments in infrastructure for the Nkoaranga Orphanage and its parent hospital, as well as direct project support, The Small Things is working to make a lasting impact on the lives of the children it serves.
Some of the organization’s projects include the following:
- Education: the children can begin attending school at the age of five, but in order to do so, they need sponsors. The Small Things works with The Foundation for Tomorrow to provide the children with uniforms, room and board, tuition, medical care, tutoring, and more.
- Project “Light Up the Night”: the orphanage’s electrical system is old, nonfunctional in some areas and even dangerous (a short in the electrical system caused a horrific fire on Valentine’s day 2009). Through Project “Light Up the Night,” The Small Things is working to completely rewire the orphanage and installing solar lighting in the hospital maternity ward, if fundraising goals are exceeded.
- Orphanage Staff: as there are currently two or three caretakers at any given time for thirty children, there must be an increase in orphanage staff. They would assist the current “mamas” in shopping for the children, preparing food for them, washing their clothes and running the school.
- Vitamins and Formula: this program provides the children of the orphanage, some of whom were suffering from iron deficiency and rickets, with a daily vitamin regimen. Additionally, the program funds the purchase of formula for all children up to six months old, as otherwise due to the high price of formula, their diets would be switched from formula to a porridge/milk/peanut butter mixture for which their systems are unprepared.
For more information about The Small Things and how you can help, including how you can volunteer at the Nkoaranga Orphanage in Tanzania, click here.
Note: The Small Things has filed for recognition as a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization.
Interview with Kim Ang, Co-Founder of GiveYourGap
The following is an interview Kim Ang, the co-founder of GiveYourGap, a portal for young volunteers to get tips and share their gap year volunteering experiences.
Tell us a little bit about your organization and the work you do.
There are two “sides” to our organization. There’s our website, GiveYourGap.org, which is a portal for young people to share different gap year volunteering experiences and get advice. Then there’s our trip, which includes 4 girls from the GiveYourGap team. Together we’ve been traveling around Asia for a few months now, volunteering everywhere we go. We’ve helped with a medical mission, English-language centers, lots of schools, an orphanage, an HIV/AIDS center, an LGBT Counseling group, a school for deaf, blind, and mute girls…the list goes on. We share our volunteer stories on the website http://giveyourgap.org/travel-team.
What’s the inside scoop on Giveyourgap.org: what experiences inspired you to become a co-founder?
We founded GiveYourGap.org when we were fresh out of college, looking for cool things to do with our gap years. With the economy as it is, we had a lot of friends who had graduated college and were unable to get jobs, so they moved abroad and volunteered their time. That seemed 100% awesome, but it also proved to be quite difficult to coordinate. We created the website to make the process easier – provide a resource of advice, share experiences, and look for opportunities.
What is the most inspiring story a member of your site has shared with you about their gap year experiences?
People are sending in inspiring stories on a daily basis, so its hard to pick! One of our featured gappers started his own organization in a small community in Ghana, and has provided hundreds of people with free first aid training and diabetes counseling. Another gapper has been working with the refugee populations in San Diego through Americorps, helping families get settled in their new homes and communities.
What was your most memorable moment during your own gap year?
Mm, this is a tough question. We’ve been to about 7 countries now and each place has a very unique story. But I would say Nepal has been the most exceptional experience. We met up with some family friends in Kathmandu – but our real mission was to visit a site in rural Nepal. To get there, we piled 8 of us (and our luggage) into a jeep that was supposed to fit 4, drove up and over some infamous Nepalese mountains (about a 12 hour trip total), and then hiked for 2 hours to our destination village. On our hike, we stopped about 4 or 5 times at various schools, giving gifts like computers (which our friends had raised funds for) and scholarships for students. It was a trek I never thought I would take, but I’m so glad it happened.
Over the next five years, what is your dream for Giveyourgap.org?
Our dream is to build an accessible, vibrant community of people interested in this kind of work for their gap year. (We call them “Gappers.”) We want to inspire people to take gap years, volunteer, travel with purpose. We love it when the community engages and we see prospective gappers contacting “gapper alumni” asking questions and finding the right fit for them. We have big goals, like GiveYourGap fellowships to help fund volunteers. If we can create that active network and really help people take the leap – we’ll be happy!
Cheetah Conservation Fund
Cheetahs are extinct in nearly half the countries they once inhabited. Their population has dwindled down to roughly 10,000, just 10% of what their estimated population in 1900. The cheetah is in fact the most endangered cat in Africa.
The Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF) is working to change this through a number of initiatives including the following:
- Science and Research: via a variety of research programs, the CCF provides scientific support for conservation activities. These include cheetah census research, biological research (including genetics), ecological research (including vegetation and prey base studies), and research into conflict between humans and wildlife. The CCF also works closely with many research institutions including the University of Namibia, the Smithsonian Institution, EarthWatch Institute and more.
- Education Programs: these include school outreach programs, farmer training and community outreach (90% of wild cheetah in Namibia live on farmlands and come into conflict with livestock and farmers), the operation of the Field Research and Education Centre which conducts both informal and formal education programs as well as providing training to both foreign university students and Namibian students. To view the full list of programs through which the CCF seeks to raise awareness of both the cheetah’s plight and the role of society in its long-term survival, click here.
- International Collaboration: CCF shares insights on successes in cheetah conversation efforts, lends resources and support including CCF materials, and assists in training programs in other countries where cheetahs live including South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Algeria, Iran and Angola. Additionally they are working with the authorities in India to re-introduce cheetahs in India.
- Library and Resources: including scientific papers and publications, progress reports, lectures and presentations, interviews and articles, factsheets, tv/radio and video highlights and international cheetah studbooks.
To learn more about the Cheetah Conservation Fund and how you can get involved, including volunteering opportunities in Kenya and Namibia, click here.
UNICEF: State of the World’s Children 2012
“Over one billion children are living in urban environments around the world, and ever year this numbers increases. Many struggle to access basic care and services. Can you imagine if you were on of them?”
For many of us, it’s hard to imagine. Nonprofits cumulatively spend vast amounts to get potential donors to empathize, to convey stories with which they can truly connect.
UNICEF has one of the most powerful campaigns we’ve seen for helping people fortunate enough to have the resources to make a difference truly put themselves in the shoes of children in need. It’s a Facebook app.
Basically it pulls profile pictures of your Facebook friends to help you wrap your mind around the baffling statistics.
In the screen shot above, in the blank spot in the center of the page, it fills in the profiles pics of 38% of your friends on Facebook. Seeing the faces of your friends and imagining that 38% of them can’t read is so much more powerful than envisioning 38% of the children in some far-off place can’t read.
Below each set of photos of your friends, there is a “Tell Me More” button. Each time you click on “tell me more” the statistic is refreshed:
Imagine you live in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. 33% of your friends live in slums.
Imagine you’re a child in Niger. Half of your friends experience growth stunting.
Imagine you’re a child in Bangladesh. Chances are 66% of your friends will marry by the age of 18.
Of those, nearly half will marry before the age of 15.
Imagine you are born in Somalia. Chances are 18% of your friends would die before the age of 5.
To check out the app for yourself, visit the UNICEF Facebook page here.
Homeless Hotspots at South by Southwest 2012
Members of the Tripping team attended this year’s SXSW Interactive festival. At the event, an entity by the name of BBH labs provided homeless people with 4G Mi-Fi devices, making them “Homeless Hotspots.” Here is how the “charitable experiment” was initially described:
This year in Austin, as you wonder between locations murmuring to your coworker about how your connection sucks and you can’t download/stream/tweet/instagram/check-in, you’ll notice strategically positioned individuals wearing “Homeless Hotspot” t-shirts. These are homeless individuals in the Case Management program at Front Steps Shelter. They’re carrying MiFi devices. Introduce yourself, then log on to their 4G network via your phone or tablet for a quick high-quality connection. You pay what you want (ideally via the PayPal link on the site so we can track finances), and whatever you give goes directly to the person that just sold you access. We’re believers that providing a digital service will earn these individuals more money than a print commodity.
We’re using SXSW as our beta test. Hopefully you can help us optimize and validate this platform, which we hope to see adopted on a broader scale. Any and all support is appreciated (including donations from afar).
The experiment proved extremely controversial with comments such as the following:
- “I’m sorry, this charitable “experiment” does nothing but turn people into wetware: Walking, talking Wi-Fi hot spots. BBH would have it that by providing this service the homeless could replace such old-media work as selling newspapers. Really? You actually think there’s a sustainable business for homeless people walking around offering Wi-Fi services? I Don’t Think So.” (Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols on ZDNet)
- “This is my worry: the homeless turned not just into walking, talking hotspots, but walking, talking billboards for a program that doesn’t care anything at all about them or their future, so long as it can score a point or two about digital disruption of old media paradigms. So long as it can prove that the real problem with homelessness is that it doesn’t provide a service.” (Tim Carmody on Wired)
- “The digital divide has never hit us over the head with a more blunt display of unselfconscious gall.” (John Mitchell for ReadWriteWeb)
Amidst all of the outrage, one reporter, Tim Fernholz, business editor for GOOD, visited the Austin Resource Center for the Homeless “to talk to the team behind the program and the homeless people who volunteered to participate.” He found that “despite outrage about the homeless hotspots at SXSW, the participants and their advocates say it’s a positive experiment.” He went on to share his conversation with one of the participants, Jonathan Hill II, who “said he doesn’t find the job demeaning. In fact, he likes it better than his usual SXSW work doing manual labor at music venues, largely because it offered a chance to talk to some of the thousands of the attendees at the program, who normally ignore the roughly 6,000-strong homeless population in Austin—or worse.”
Tim Fernholz’s verdict?
“The homeless hotspots created this controversy largely because of the idea that homeless people are somehow different from everyone else. But when you actually speak to people like Clarence, Jonathan, and their advocates, you realize they aren’t much different from the thousands of other folks trying to make a buck off the festival—except that in so doing they’re also publicizing an important social issue that makes many people uncomfortable.”
So was it exploitation or empowerment? You’ve seen both sides of the story – what do you think?
Daegu’s Time to Give
The following is a guest post submitted directly by a Tripper and co-founder of the charity Daegu’s Time To Give.
My name is Bea and I am a 23 year old English girl living and working as an English teacher in South Korea. My two friends and I have recently set up a volunteer and fundraising organisation called Daegu’s Time to Give.
South Korea has many orphanages which care for a large number of children and young adults. Daegu is the second biggest city in South Korea and has a large number of orphanages. We set up this organisation with an aim to integrate the ex-pat and Korean community and provide supplies, fun and smiles to the children in the orphanages. Many ex-pats are eager to volunteer but find it difficult to find a suitable position due to schedule conflicts and language barriers; that’s where we come in!
We are working with 6 orphanages and welfare centres to find volunteer placements that suit our volunteers and benefit the children. These range from English teaching, to long term regular volunteering, to one day visiting and playing games!
The orphanages also face an endless list of required supplies, so we organise fundraisers to help them out. We have recently thrown a speed dating event to help provide back to school supplies.
We also organised a Christmas gift drive, where we provided 6 orphanages with individual gifts for all the children. Ex-pats collected a bag, filled it with gifts for their child, and then we delivered them on Christmas day. Hundreds of ex-pats got involved!
If you are thinking of visiting Daegu and would like to get involved, whether that be for a few days, weeks or longer then please contact us! If you have any advice, suggestions or stories then also please contact us, we would love to hear from you!
We hope to create positive and caring relationships between ex-pats and the Korean community, provide the opportunity for ex-pats to reach out to the community they now call home, and put a smile on the faces of some very deserving children 
Contact:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Daegus-Time-to-Give/288848664478956?sk=info
http://daegustimetogive.wordpress.com/
You can read the coverage of their speed dating event in the Korea Herald by clicking here.
Women Win (Advancing Women’s Rights Through Sports)
Women Win is a global organization which uses sport as a strategy to advance women’s rights around the world.
Women Win was founded in 2007 and has positively impacted the the lives of 9,300 women and girls. Built on a model that centers on the premise that women and girls are empowered by access to resources and opportunities and by acquiring new, valuable skills, Women Win seeks to raise the bar on quality for girls’ and women’s sports programs by setting standards around good practices.
Women Win does not develop or implement any of their own programs. Rather, they invest in community-based organizations in 19 countries, working closely with partner staff to understand their work and its impact. They are partnered with 26 programs around the world. Some of these programs include the following:
- Association de Soutien et d’Appui aux Femmes Entrepreneurs (ASAFE): located in Cameroon, ASAFE encourages the development of female leadership through street football. It also provides women with microfinance, counseling and hands-on business education to create sustainable prosperity.
- Safe Spaces : an organization run both by and for young women and adolescent girls in Eastlands Kenya, Safe Spaces addresses the issue of severe gender inequality by organizing young-women-leader-facilitated programs in the areas of dance, basketball,yoga and weekly discussion sessions about the issues faced by young females living in the slums. Each girl’s activities are based on their talents, and their skills are developed through focus on their individual strengths, either in music or theater or even a certain game, dancing or poetry. Every girl then teaches other girls in their area of greatest skill, building self-esteem and providing an opportunity for leadership.
- Moving the Goalposts (MTG): more than 3,000 adolescent girls in the rural district of Kilifi in Kenya participate in weekly practices, ongoing leagues and tournaments. Each week, MTG girls lead peer education session in local primary schools to discuss reproductive health and other girls’ issues. Participants are also encouraged to take active leadership roles within their teams and leagues by refereeing, coaching, providing first aid and joining committees. Additionally, MTG empowers girls economically via savings projects for girls out of school and leadership awards for starting small businesses.
- Empowering Women of Nepal: female adventure trekking guide trainees participate in a four-week intensive program, including learning about the geography and culture of Nepal, first aid, conversational English, health and hygiene, trekking instruction, leadership skills and women’s rights. Participants, who are disadvantaged rural women of Nepal, are provided with job placement services in addition to the training in a traditionally male-dominated field.
- Colombianitos: works with children in six areas of Colombia severely affected by poverty and strife. Their programs for children who are the victims of “armed conflict, forced displacement and, consequently, a life of absolute poverty” provide them with new hope through education, life skills and strong values.
Building New Hope
Building New Hope is a nonprofit supporting grassroots development projects in Central America.
Building New Hope works primarily in Nicaragua and El Salvador to empower local communities through literacy programs for underserved and at-risk youth, providing career training at dedicated centers, selling fairly traded organic coffee and funding income-generating projects for women. Their work focuses on both raising awareness of the challenges facing people in Central America in their daily lives and building people-to-people bridges of hope and understanding.
The projects run by Building New Hope include the following:
- Quinta Los Chavalos: more than 50 children from the Barrio Miralago participate in the innovative educational programs which encompass literacy classes, math and science education and computer training. The children are provided with homework tutoring as well as extra math and reading classes, sports and music and art activities. La Quinta also serves as a hub for international volunteers.
- Escuelita Yo Puedo: the school provides youngsters ranging from preschoolers to adolescents with learning materials lacking in public schools and activities including opportunities to learn to read and do math, sing and play games. The children are taught skills including personal hygiene and health, computer skills and piano lessons. In addition, they experience a variety of field trips, including trips to historical sites or the volcano and participation in activities such as picnicking or swimming.
- Proyecto Alas (Project Wings): provides annual scholarships enabling young people to attend high school; gives participants an opportunity to travel around Nicaragua to gain practical knowledge about their country; connects participants with volunteer opportunities, for example disaster relief for a sister community in El Salvador; career presentations from professionals in the area, inspiring the youth to pursue their dreams.
- Rhythm in the Barrios: part of Quinta Los Chavalos, it is an excellent music program which introduces underprivileged children in several Granada neighborhoods and numerous rural schools to the joy of music by teaching them to play piano, flute and guitar. The students perform for audiences in the city’s central park, in local restaurants and at city children’s events.
- Casa Lupita: a health clinic for street animals that provides stray dogs and cats, as well as work horses that can be seen everywhere on Granada’s streets with veterinary care and nutrition. They invite both volunteer veterinary professionals as well as non-professionals to participate in their programs.
In addition to its own work, Building New Hope supports a number of sponsored projects. To read more about Building New Hope and how you can get involved, including volunteer opportunities, click here.
Albion Education Center
Albion Education Center educates villagers in Belize in sustainable lifestyles using integrated, organic, agriculture, handicrafts, village tourism, low cost, vernacular homes, and out of school youth programs.
The education center is creating an integrated, organic, agriculture system to demonstrate to the villager how they can receive more food with less work and on less land using the Permaculture philosophy. We also are creating a wildlife food tree nursery to help promote food security for the wildlife. We teach workshops to the villagers on subjects like computers, cooking, crafts, English, and other subjects the villagers want and we have the expertise. We help the village promote village tourism based on cultural exchange, the environment, and volunteerism.
We want to have a walking nature trail through the village with identification markers at the different trees and shrubs. We help villagers construct low cost, hurricane resistant, houses using tires and ferro-cement. We also provide a library and internet service for students and limited funds to aid students who have to commute to high school.
We work as a team in a loving way. We have a work exchange program using www.workawayer.info or directly corresponding with us. As of now, we have no outside funding, working only off surplus retirement income and help from volunteers.
This post was submitted by Rod Rylander, a three-time Peace Corps volunteer (Philippines 1988-90, Belize 2000-02, and Crisis Corps 2005) and member of the National Peace Corps Association Network on Tripping. He has been recognized in the fields of ornithology, community development, environmental education, business, park ranger at Grand Canyon NP, and a designer and builder of alternative, vernacular homes and has lived in 6 countries for a total of over 15 years. You can follow his blog here or visit the Albion Education Center website.
