NGO Voices & Past Projects

Estrategia de Caracol comedor is a government-run community kitchen in an immigrant villa.

Recognizing the environmental effects of the kitchen’s poor sanitation and its potential for impact as the center of the community, students at Biosfera sought to 1) enhance the environmental consciousness of the neighborhood, 2) practice environmentally responsible behavior, and 3) strengthen ties between the community and Biosfera.

Students mobilized the community to collect reused plastic bottles to construct a greenhouse. As a result, the kitchen 1) can grow its own produce, 2) become less dependent on the municipality, and 3) will sell excess produce for profit.

The students also conducted a multimedia project with pictures and video-taped interviews that document the relationship residents have with the environment.

Horacio Belaustegui, Founder and Executive Director of Biosfera comments, “There was good support and a fluent, open exchange of opinions, impressions and ideas within the group, which enriched our organization and the community.”

Siluva is a community-based organization that assists the mentally disabled in reaching their full potential. The organization identified a greenhouse as a desirable project, and the team recognized the publication of a monthly magazine of stories and drawings by Siluva attendees as an opportunity to increase community awareness. The team followed both these leads and produced a greenhouse, compost shelter, maintenance handbook for the garden, and a supplementary pamphlet for the magazine that describes Siluva’s work and philosophy.

The team’s activities will build the capacity of Siluva attendees by providing an activity – gardening – that yields tangible results. The homegrown produce will be used in the Siluva kitchen and sold to the community, and the pamphlet will increase awareness about Siluva and mental disabilities.

Team member Rashmi Bhat (Duke University) “felt incredibly fulfilled every day just being at Siluva – while from the outside, it might have seemed like we were just chatting with the staff and the people at the community center, what we were actually doing was building deep relationships and communicating to them that they mattered – that we came all the way over there to be with them and learn from them.”

The Arco Iris team worked with a sewing cooperative that began with a dog clothing line, “Mi Perrito,” and is currently working on a baby clothing line, “Sweet Baby.” After seeing the cooperative’s chaotic work environment, the team’s mission became clear. They began creating an organized workspace in which the cooperative can more efficiently produce high-quality products. After learning about the cooperative’s interest in baby clothes, the team began researching the current market as well.

The group increased efficiency by improving the sewing cooperative’s physical space, consulted with owners of baby clothing stores in the area, compiled embroidery ideas, and researched expansion options to produce the Sweet Baby Marketing Project, and completed a Future Intern Resource Binder, containing a detailed history of the sewing cooperative, contact list, inventory, and future project ideas.

Community members at St. Francis expressed frustration with their inability to perform labor-intensive tasks. Delving deeper, the GESI discovered that these families suffered from poor nutrition and were unable to afford healthy food they did not grow themselves. By empowering community members to grow and eat their own mushrooms, the students facilitated an increased knowledge of proper nutrition and augmented household income per mushroom cycle.

The GESI team selected a “Mushroom Jjaja (‘Grandmother’),” who in turn chose five community members (the “Starter Set”) to begin the project. As a result, six families were provided with a suitable space to grow mushrooms. The team also helped construct hanging mushroom gardens for each family, which the community members prepared and packed themselves. In addition, a local mushroom expert hosted a seminar about harvesting and selling mushrooms.

In the future, the Jjaja will teach the mushroom-growing process, including husk preparation, garden packing and hanging, and watering and harvesting, to other community members. She is responsible for collecting the weekly dues of 5000 UGX per participant and will carry out the sustainability plan.  Read Bryan Stenson’s blog about his experience on GESI at St. Francis.

After discovering that one of the ORUDE-run financial cooperatives – the Mafubira Sub-county Savings and Credit Cooperative (MARUSACCO) – needed a new direction, the ORDUE team threw themselves into capacity building at MARUSACCO. They worked with the board to increase financial and technical literacy and improve organization, and also visited eight of the ten village groups that make up MARUSACCO, where they recorded positive and negative practices, compiled records, and used their findings to create a lesson plan for training bank leaders.

One highlight of the project was a “re-launch” event that brought the village groups together to sell their products at the newly established MARUSACCO market.  Another highlight was when MARUSACCO obtained an official bank certificate, allowing it to operate as a full-fledged bank. Group member Simon Han describes this moment in his blog.

“The good news was delivered yesterday during the Wednesday management meeting, and instantly the spirit in the room jumped. Smiles and laughter all around. Betty even hollered the classic Ugandan cheer, ‘Ai-yeee-ya-ya-ya-ya!’”  Read what GESI participant Aaron Jacobowitz says about this project.

One of the biggest assets that the team identified within the community was the potential of its youth. They therefore chose to work on a tailoring training program previously initiated by OGLM, which they utilized to equip young people with skills allowing them to become self-sufficient.

The group enhanced the educational experience for the students by compiling a student manual that contains the tailoring curriculum and other information that will prepare students for business opportunities and/or future schooling after they leave the tailoring program. They also produced a similar teacher manual to help the teacher facilitate the workshop and provide a vision for future opportunities.

While working with OGLM, group member Emily Crane valued the “constant discussion with community members and leaders. Our project would not have been successful if we had isolated the community or had decided that our way was the best way.”

The project focused on microfinance institutions discrimination against people with disabilities and addressed the community’s desire to learn about microfinance services, build a savings culture, and promote their financial self-sufficiency. The interns revitalized IDIWA’s previous microfinance initiative, Iganga Disabled People’s Savings and Credit Cooperative (IDP SACCO).

The team increased the capacity of the IDP SACCO through professional training and other capacity building activities, created a workplan to outline the future plans of the SACCO, and developed a curriculum for sensitizing Iganga communities on basics of microfinance which they used to train nine parishes in Namungalwe and Bulamagi sub-counties.

Elizabeth Kayanga, the GESI group’s supervisor at IDIWA, was impressed by their teamwork and energy: “They worked as a team, were self driven, committed and confident. They were social and cooperative. They promised to keep in touch and provide any useful information they come across to the CSCS. IDIWA team will miss them at the office.”

The Foundation for Ecological Security (FES) focuses on reforestation and other drought-related issues, while prioritizing social equity and civic engagement. The GESI team selected nine farming villages in the area and investigated these villages in order to provide recommendations for their future involvement with FES.

The team designed and conducted Participatory Rural Assessment (PRA) activities in the selected villages, producing an assessment in areas of health, education, agriculture, water, and other issues based on the perspective of the villagers themselves. In the process of conducting PRAs, the GESI team boosted trust of FES in the region which will facilitate the organization’s work there and they created a project recommendation to be implemented after their departure.

Yash Shethia, the FES supervisor, noted that the GESI project was crucial for the organization to move forward with its work in the region: “FES [needed] an initial assessment of Kamalnath forest range…. Our team had planned for this work for this financial year, but we were caught into the financial as well as human resource crunch…This group has helped in getting our planned work completed.”

After learning of the organization’s interest in furthering education programming at their Youth Resource Centers, half of the Seva Mandir team focused on rural youth livelihood development in a nearby village.

However, after conducting introductory research in Seva’s library and the community, it became clear that the community had few livelihoods options, and that Seva’s approach to livelihoods limited community-self determination. Also, the group began to notice the youth’s demand for more discussion and action on social issues.

With these two shifts in mind, the group developed an “Action Curriculum” containing analytic frameworks for youth to analyze and discuss issues and decisions, facilitation methods for the Sada YRC to create discussion and implement the frameworks, and special skills-training seminars to build youth capacity and cohesion.  Read a student blog from the experience.

While their teammates were working at the Seva Mandir Youth Resource Center, the other half of the team worked at Seva Mandir’s Children’s Corners. The centers provide supplemental education to children in formal schooling or basic education to children who are not enrolled in school.

The team sought to increase community engagement with and awareness of Children’s Corners. At Shivaji Nagar, the team sought to increase parent involvement Children’s Corners by connecting lessons to the greater community and to engage the children in larger discussions about decisions involving their community. To this end, the team produced a community discussion activity guidebook in English and Hindi that includes five different games to generate discussions among children about important issues in their community.

At Bheelu Rana, the team wanted to better integrate Children’s Corners into the community through an event giving the children an opportunity to demonstrate what they have learned. The team’s primary objective was to plan a mela (fair) in which children would prepare stalls (such as math and writing charts, henna designs, and computer typing).

The GESI team built upon a pre-existing Financial Literacy curriculum to increase the long-term sustainability of Sahayata Livelihoods programming. In order to do so, the team improved upon the existing Financial Literacy Class, created the Supplemental Business Program from scratch, developed metric evaluation material for both the Financial Literacy Class and the Supplemental Business Curriculum, and completed a grant to benefit Sahayata Livelihoods.

Catherine Wu (Wellesley College) emphasizes the team’s involvement in the community throughout their project: “We conducted extensive interviews with community members to understand what they got out of the classes whose curriculum we were working on. We got a lot of input from them about what we should include in the new curriculum and how we should present it. We also used community members to test our curriculum.”

The team delivered their Supplemental Business Program curriculum to FSD, local teachers, and the Indian School of Microfinance for Women, where it will be used to help train others in the basics of starting and growing businesses.  Read GESI participant Catherine Wu’s blog about Sahayata.