Meaningful Volunteer will partner with My Best Friend's Closet to bring you some great fair trade craft from Uganda and the Philippines. Our artists from both Grassroots Uganda and the Payawpao Orchids will be featured.
To celebrate the partnership, we'll be having a fair trade event at My Best Friends Closet on the 9th December.
Staff from Meaningful Volunteer will be at the event from 11 am to 5pm to talk about the craft and how buying it empowers many women around the globe.
My Best Friends closet is in Vancouver, Canada at 3190 Cambie Street.
Make sure you become a Facebook fan of My Best Friend's Closet here.
A Note of Caution on Bed Net Coverage
Over at Malaria No More website, Ben Brophy makes the following observation:
Several malaria advocates here expressed concern about bed net coverage.
Once universal coverage is reached, will donors think that we have finished the job? What about when the bed nets need to be replaced in 3 years – at a time when the Global Fund, as a result of the recent replenishment, will have precious few resources for new investments?
[...]
This is a very real and pertinent observation. It is not enough to hand out mosquito nets. It is not enough to train people in their use.
Anyone who has ever slept under a mosquito net will tell you the nets rip and tear.
We are well aware of this here at the Malaria Operation. One of the keys steps in our process is coordinating the follow up visits.
We take a GPS measurement at every house we visit. This allows us to know the exact location of the house. We keep all this information in our Household Database.
This makes follow up visits easy to coordinate. We can tell our volunteers go here, here and here. They can then find the households very easily with a simple hand held GPS device. An iPhone would work just as well!
Mama Pamba Launch Event
Mama Pamba is up and running!
The 6th of November saw Mama Pamba launch via a combination fundraiser-launch event at a bowling event in Canada. The bowling event was chosen to make it as family friendly as possible.
Over $US1,000 was raised. This money will be used to purchase sewing machines, tailor-quality scissors, and other supplies to get us up and started.
Check out a video from the event below!
Founder of Meaningful Volunteer featured in Korean Herald
For many expat English teachers in Korea, life is comfortable, with most provided with a free apartment and enough money to make savings at the end of each month.
But for Malcolm Trevena, who before coming to Korea had a successful career as an IT consultant in his native New Zealand, his job teaching English in Suwon was keeping him from his true vocation a life of activism.
Read the full article here.
3 Nov 2010
New Website Released
Meaningful Volunteer is delighted to announce its new website.
We've spent a lot of time working on the new website based on feedback from our volunteers.
We now have a tight relationship between our project and the United Nations Millennium Development Goals.
Each of our projects also prominently display the information that you need to know: program costs, where you will be housed, country information and who your support staff will be.
So, take a look around and let us know what you think!
Meaningful Fashion Survey
Meaningful Volunteer is very happy that our fashion project is under way, but we need your help!
We've come up with a bunch of cool names and we need your opinion on them!
Click here to take the survey and lets us know what you think!
Meaningful Fashion Project.
Celebrating the many shapes, sizes, and ages of beauty.
Meaningful Volunteer is delighted to announce the launch of a new project in Uganda called Meaningful Fashion.
Meaningful Fashion (a provisional name) is a 100% fair-trade, sweat-shop free, fashion label based in Buyaya in Eastern Uganda. All the Meaningful Volunteer staff are hard at work behind the scenes to launch the label in May 2011.
The highlight of the project will be a fashion show in a town near Buyaya: complete with a catwalk, music, photographers, video cameras, a live webcast feed, and a myriad of models in all shapes, sizes and ages.
There will be numerous ways you can get involved in this project including on-the-ground volunteering, become a distributor in your own country, and - of course - purchasing some great fashion!
We'll be posting updates on the project in the coming months. Keep an eye out!
New Program: The Malaria Operation
Meaningful Volunteer is delighted to announce the launch of the Malaria Operation.
The Malaria Operation takes a systematic approach to reducing malaria in Buyaya - our initial target area.
Every step of the process is covered: All the way from raising sponsorship money with which to buy the nets, through to follow up visits to ensure the nets are being used correctly. Check out the full process here.
Malaria accounts for 53% of all deaths in Buyaya and we are going to do our best to reduce that figure.
Contact Megin Alvarez - our volunteer coordinator for more information. megin@meaningfulvolunteer.org
Water and Rice Campaign
Meaningful Volunteer and CERV Philippines are teaming up to bring some much needed water and rice to some extremely poor Filipinos in the Pampanga region of the Philippines.
We are aiming to gather enough money to repair a broken water pump, and deliver two sacks of a traditioanl rice seeds to 400 households. All up this will come to about $US488.
Malcolm Trevena to talk at the Seoul Global Study Group
Who: Seoul Global Study Group, Coordinated by Professor Layne Hartsell (SKKU)
What: NGO Hands On! Dinner with Malcolm Trevena: Service work in the trenches
Where: EcoTable (EcoPabsang) Restaurant, Line 3 (Orange) Kyeongbuk Palace Exit 4
When: Saturday, June 19, 2010
Time: 7:00pm to 9:00pm
RSVP: Via Facebook, or 010-6388-4961
We would like to extend an invitation for our upcoming dinner and speaking event. Malcolm Trevena was born and bred in South Auckland and had a successful ten year career in information technology before volunteering for six months in the Philippines and nine months in Africa. He became disillusioned with the "volunteer tourism" he saw, and founded Meaningful Volunteer so that international volunteers could make a real and meaningful impact on developing communities. Malcolm will discuss his experiences with us at this event.
40 seats available: W 20,000 RSVP and W 25,000 at door
Students/low-income: send email for scholarships seoulstudy@gmail.com
Seoul Global Study Group contact number: 010-6388-4961