The deal

Each summer, thousands of students and young people travel around the world to lend a hand in service projects and volunteer opportunities. What impact do they have? What are they learning? Who do they meet? What are the things they do that work? This summer, change.org and the Consortium for Student Global Service (CSGS) are teaming up to provide some insight into the work of a select group of volunteers working with small-scale, student-driven nonprofits in on-the-ground, local development.

Join in

Are you going abroad this summer with a CSGS organization or another student-driven org we haven’t met yet? Have a way with the written word? Got moxie? If so, we want you to contribute. Send an email to stud...@gmail.com with:

* A resume, including travel and writing experience (even if it’s just a personal blog)
* Two writing samples of 300 words or less (these can be blog posts)
* The name of the organization you’ll be working with, the dates of your travel, and a brief description of the project you’ll be working on (if your org isn’t a CSGS member, please include website and email addresses)

Please have applications in by May 22th, and put your writing samples in the text of the email rather than in an attachment. We’ll let you know by May 29 whether you’ve been selected.

The globalservice.change.org site will launch on June 1, and run until September 1. Ten featured bloggers who will be expected to contribute two stories a week, posted for the whole world to see.

What’s in it for me?

Fair question. With a community of almost a half-million members, change.org is one of the web’s leading young voices on global issues, and your name is going to be on there. Just within CSGS are hundreds of other volunteers and who will be reading your posts. And for your own blog, we’ll provide you with a badge that will let anybody who reads know you’ve been given the thumbs-up from change.org. Even if you’re not chosen as a featured blogger, we’ll still choose some folks for a blogroll on the globalservice.change.org channel.

Applications are due today for the MPI Summer Program. Summer volunteers spend four weeks working on site in either Ecuador or Nicaragua, serving an underprivileged population, and addressing the challenges of community development. The program integrates the volunteers into the daily functions of MPI Program Directors as they assist in planning classes, instructing lessons, and implementing projects. For more information on how to apply, visit our website.

Student Movement for Real Change invites college students to participate in its annual Global Development Internship (GDI) program during the summer of 2009.

The GDI aims to provide college students on-the-ground development experience, cultural immersion, and the necessary leadership skills to develop sustainable projects that address local needs through a 6-8 week internship in impoverished communities. Interns will complete community needs assessments, coordinate train the trainers programs, and work with local people to identify development projects. This summer SMRC will bring 15 students to Manyeleti, South Africa and 10 students to Kayafungo, Kenya to live with local families and learn first hand about the challenges of rural poverty. Applications are due by midnight on December 31st, 2008.

Learn more about the South Africa and Kenya GDI at www.studentmovementusa.org/globalinternship

BBC Best Practices Committee

Erin Barnhart from Idealist.org leads this group. Their charge is to create best practices for international volunteering. To that end, we’ve been collecting and reporting on other documents, and are gathering together a set of interview questions to take to volunteer-sending organizations. My job is to take all the random questions we’ve compiled and put them in a workable format, at which point we’ll start interviewing organizations to find out their practices. They also want to do some kind of concept mapping project here; anybody know about that?

Some other resources and website mentioned on the calls

www.goabroad.com
www.worldvolunteerweb.org
beglobal.net
glimpse.org

Run by Northwestern University’s Center for Global Engagement and supported abroad by the Foundation for Sustainable Development, the Global Engagement Summer Institute program will bring together students from universities around the country to learn from and work with communities in India, Argentina, and Uganda experiencing the problems of poverty and injustice.

The Global Engagement Summer Institute is a two-course summer study abroad program focused on teaching approximately 80 students per year about community development in a global context. The program is an expansion of the CGE’s “ENGAGE Uganda” program, which has sent almost 40 students to work in team based community development in Uganda.

The GESI program features three components: a 10-day lead-in Institute on Northwestern’s campus in Evanston, IL, a seven-week team-based project immersion with host nonprofits in either India, Argentina, or Uganda, and a short wrap-up summit in Chicago.

I’m thinking specifically accountability for college students who are carrying out international service projects. This topic is relevant to MPI, to CGI U, and hopefully to many of you.

How do we ensure follow through from the beginning?
Using step-by-step charts with deadlines, assigned responsibilities, etc. to facilitate follow through. Does anyone have some kind of relevant “project management chart”?
Delegating responsibility and keeping others accountable. This can be especially challenging when the work is voluntary.
How to save a project that is behind schedule.
How to filter differentiate between the reliable and less reliable volunteers early on.

The Consortium for Global Service is in the process of developing a better architecture for sharing best practices and lessons learned among student global service projects, in order to improve student impact on the ground in service projects focused on health, education, and poverty alleviation. Specifically, the project involves the creation of a global service hub on Change.org, in order to aggregate and connect the disparate writing and reflection of students involved in global service around the world, and then launching an open source curriculum initiative, in which the member organizations translate their best practices and lessons learned into simple, standard, replicable format curricular modules that can be used by students and teachers undertaking service projects in any context.