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Community Service -
"Social Change Online: Volunteering in Peru”

Volunteering in Peru is just a mouse-click away. A group of young Peruvian social entrepreneurs have organized the first and only large-scale volunteering system in Peru (replicable elsewhere) which you can contact through their Web site: www.trabajovoluntario.org.

Jaime Ulloa, the ringleader, volunteered at an after-school program and a senior citizens group in Philadelphia while he was at the University of Pennsylvania for a few months to put the finish on his English. He saw the possibilities of volunteering as a way of bringing about social change to raise the quality of life in Peru, which he had been contemplating for a long time, especially after spending a year and a half in Puno while working for Backus.

Making a difference

Hoping to inject a vertical dynamic into the horizontal layers of Peru's socioeconomic stratigraphy, Ulloa and his colleagues applied business strategies to the world of social enterprise. Mostly through the Internet and through corporate volunteering programs, their organization, Asociación Trabajo Voluntario (Volunteer Work Association), matches supply and demand, bringing together nonprofit organizations and people who would like to volunteer. Trabajo Voluntario is a civil nonprofit association, a second stage organization, acting, Jaime explains, “as a support for volunteering. Trabajo Voluntario is an organization that promotes, strengthens and facilitates volunteering. For individuals, we provide information that facilitates getting involved; we also encourage and train them. For nonprofits, we help them recruit volunteers and train managerial ranks in volunteer management and management. Finally, for corporations, we encourage them to create group volunteering programs; we also assist them in making it happen, maintaining and developing their programs.”

Presently on their Web site there are listings for specific, up-to-date volunteering possibilities and they have over 18,000 subscribers, about 30% of whom have worked as a volunteer. Individuals can volunteer, just go to the site and see what interests you; there is also an electronic newsletter for those who want to receive it. If you are interested, you can get in touch with any of the organizations directly or you can fill out the online form with your data and Trabajo Voluntario will send it on to the organization. Corporations can also make contact through the Web site or email or call to find out organizing a group for a volunteering event and the training benefits offered by Trabajo Voluntario. Help is not only needed in refurbishing playgrounds, parks, schools, orphanages and public hospitals, but also more specialized services such as help in public relations, management, marketing, fundraising and organizing events, as well as other specific talents and skills (music, medicine, nutrition).

Corporations are a mainstay of the Peruvian economy. Although small and informal businesses provide nearly 85 percent of jobs, the corporate sector - including industries such as mining, fishing, and corporate agribusiness - generates export earnings and taxes that keep the banks alive, pay the bureaucrats and pave the streets. The corporate world also contains the highest concentration of educated people in the country. In the macro view of the founders of Trabajo Voluntario, themselves from the corporate sector, it was the logical sector to look to as a source of social change. Trabajo Voluntario has been encouraged in this direction by foundations that support it, such as the Avina and W. K. Kellogg foundations, which emphasize that encouraging corporate social responsibility will help bridge the corporate world and social sector.

Volunteering is to everyone's mutual benefit in the short run: for the individual volunteers, the benefits are a sense of personal satisfaction and a chance to give something back to society; the companies who promote group volunteering benefit from the integration volunteering promotes among employees from different levels in the company and the new interpersonal and managerial skills they learn; for the nonprofit organizations the benefit is increased man- and woman-power; and ultimately, for increasing numbers of society's most disenfranchised members, the benefits are sometimes concrete - a playground, a park, more cheerful surroundings, a day of fun - and perhaps serve as an experience which them helps form a more positive sense of their self-worth. It is hard to measure such intangibles and even harder to put a value on their long-term value, but both common sense and intuition tell us they are small but important considerations for the future of society.

In the long run, volunteering is envisioned as the beginning of a large-scale and continuous investment in the social capital of Peru.

You can read more about Volunteering in Peru at http://www.changemakers.net/journal/04june/romero.cfm -- Freda Wolf de Romero

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