Dear Colleagues, As a former US Peace Corps volunteer and co-founder of a volunteer clearinghouse in Sri Lanka, I would like to address Tom Abeles' comments on the role of volunteers. In the aftermath of the tsunami there have been hundreds of people from around the world that have volunteered their efforts in the relief and rehabilitation process in this country alone. To date, we have placed volunteers with about 3 dozen small community based NGOs, both foreign and Sri Lankan national organizations.
There is a role for volunteers, just as ask any the over 80 volunteers we have placed so far. But this must be a structured and demand-driven activity. We ask for a minimum committment of one month and we base placements on volunteers' skill sets and the needs of community-level NGOs both international and local. It is important to note that the reason this organization was formed was because no large international NGO, multilateral or bilateral body operating in Sri Lanka thought that these talents were worth mobilizing. With the money any one of these NGOs uses to buy and import a new Toyota Land Cruiser, we could run this operation (with the exception of my salary, a notable exception to be sure) for over two years and still have over half the money left over to finance community grant and loan projects. The typical response from these organizations when asked about volunteers is that they are relief and development professionals, and that we should leave this very complicated task to them. My response is that asking a community what they want and then mobilizing the resources to make that happen requires neither an advanced degree nor long years of experience. All it takes is patience, a listening ear, and access to informational resources that are readily available on the web. The real experts in this picture live within the communities themselves. And anyone, volunteer or professional, would do well to listen to what they have to say. These people generally have a very clear idea of what they want and they know how to prioritize these needs. They are prepared to accept the consequences of their decisions in a way that a consultant or aid worker is completely incapable of doing - after all they must live with these consequences long after the funding ends and the consultants go home. As I see it, the role of the foreign aid worker is to: 1) Discover what the community needs 2) Translate these needs into something the donor can deliver, 3) Ensure that the donor receives adequate feedback in the form of reporting, transparency and accountability. These activities, if performed in partnership with a community, can be accomplished by a relative neophyte. My point is that in a world of limited resources we should be using every possible tool at our disposal. To say that volunteers aren't needed is to ignore the phenomenal potential of this nearly limitless resource. Cheers, Tod Bruning -- Tod Bruning VSL Team Leader [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.VolunteerSriLanka.org Int'l: +94 776 985663 In Sri Lanka: 0776 985663 On Thursday, June 30, 2005, Tom Abeles wrote: > 3) Volunteers are not a free commodity to any organization. The temporal > nature and varied level of competencies and knowledge require signifcant > management to properly utilize the latent talent. Organizations have real > overheads which need to be acknowledged so that the project can reach > maximum benefit. At times, it may be worth the cost of highly qualified > or even over-qualified professionals than to "make do" with under funded > volunteer organizations. ------------ ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, a Non-Profit Organization*** To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.edc.org/GLG/gkd/>
