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ENVIRONMENT & COMMUNITY EDUCATION In this program volunteers will help to develop village and school profiles and organize meetings with school management committees, students, and community members, in an effort to identify the further needs of the school and the community. Simply by helping to identify said needs, through data sampling and community mapping, volunteers are positively contributing because subsequent projects can thus be developed and prioritized. In this way, children’s groups in particular will be highly motivated and more effective in disseminating needed education and awareness. One focus is to create newsletters for government schools, enabling the students to have a major creative outlet that can be used for confidence building and education dissemination. Volunteers will work together with VSSN and a motivated and experienced Nepali counterpart, who have experience organizing activities that mobilize students into action. These activities may cover environmental campaigns, sanitation campaigns, conservation campaigns, health issue campaigns, etc. This program will work in partnership with students and the community at large, and will be implemented by a team of volunteers, students, partner NGOs and community members. Volunteers provide support to local projects by contributing labor and time, while students and community members contribute by providing local materials, labor, and needed experience. Examples of this type of a micro-level project include the setting up of a local library, community dramas, classroom renovation, school building painting etc. VSSN is aware that not all volunteers posses the same skills and capacity, which is why the volunteers' prime responsibility is to organize extra curricular learning activities through student groups (children’s clubs). Volunteers will either establish or work with an existing students group. The existing groups are run by motivated, enthusiastic, and committed students— the students are essential in reinforcing your work at the school and it will be their responsibility to maintain the groups and activities after you leave. With capacity building training and resource support, these student groups can help raise the awareness, about a variety of issues, of other students and the community at large, to ensure a sustainable impact. |
During their stay in community, volunteers will also organize awareness raising activities to help promote the understanding of various environmental and development issues. Volunteers will combine artistic activities, such as dramas, painting, story and poetry writing, as well as games and competitions, with educational information.