Community2: Community-driven high-impact volunteering
This is my very initial proposal for a project that will hopefully end up being my thesis.
Volunteering abroad has become one of the world’s fastest-growing trends. Young African faces abound in People magazine amongst celebrity personalities. The trend steadily has found its way into high school and college students, and continues in a host of churches and mission organizations.
These good people are driven by an inspiration to help people struggling with poverty and health issues. However, these programs on average make little impact, or do harm to the communities in which they act. Volunteers more often than not lack the technical skills, language ability, or community understanding to be effective. In many cases, volunteers arrive with a preconceived notion of a community’s problems and possible solutions. These programs have been branded “low-impact” or “no-impact” volunteering.
What if there was a way that communities in need could explain what they thought they needed? What if there was a way to volunteer and actually make a difference? These questions are what led to the formation of a project called “Community2.” It is a internet-based program that allows communities in need to connect with skilled people in other nations for high-impact volunteering trips. It is the evolution of community. For those familiar with other similar programs, think of it as a kiva.org of volunteering — lending micro-help for macro-impact to people in need.
For example, say that a small rural village in Rwanda needs a water well installed, but does not have the funding or the expertise to install the project. Another group in the US is looking to go to Rwanda, and they want to do a malaria project. After some research on Community2, however, the US group finds that malaria is not an issue in the example village, but that water access is. The group gets together some funding and sends an enthusiastic engineer to the village, who stays with a village family, and installs the pump, while teaching the locals how to operate and repair the equipment.
The name, Community2, expresses the idea that current definitions and concepts of community are not useful, and “community service” should extend beyond these traditionally-drawn borders through the use of a “community expander,” in this case, the internet.