By Valeria Coles
My story for this project begins with who I am and what I am very passionate about
My name is Valeria Coles Zamora and I was born in Lima, Peru.
Ever since I was a young girl I always loved going back to my country and observing the needs of my home and how I could help.
My hope and my dream is always to go back to these communities and offer service, and self reliance.
I know my people are hard workers, leaders, and innovators. They can do much on their own, once guided and led, not just given to.
Valeria’s Story
This program creates sustainability, self-reliance, and ownership for the orphanages in South America by increasing local volunteer work/participation through implementing their community more to join serving the orphanages.
This was the project I created is for a local humanitarian organization in Rexburg, Idaho called, OSSO. They travel to orphanages in South America to go serve and bring American Volunteers with them. I create the local volunteering program for them to implement in their organization/ service, to address the concern of the orphanages administration of not having enough volunteer support from the community. OSSO’s focus is to recruit members to bring to the orphanages in other countries, although what are we doing, that they can’t do as well?
My why rooted behind my passion and desire to make humanitarian work less of a status, and more of a doing real good, and transforming communities.
This was EVERYTHING that was going on in my brain, during my senior project. I wanted to do humanitarian work, although I didn’t know where to start.
I began to network, and connect, and do informational interviews, collecting resources and data. This began my collection of research, what I learned, and how it led me to my next thought process.
This was my strategic thinking.
This is the Cuenca, Ecuador Program, specifically tailored and created for their orphanage, Hogar de Angeles.
This has identified barriers that were given from the local coordinators who work at Hogar de Angeles. This draft that will be completed by the end of the semester as I continue to meet with the coordinators in Ecuador pinpointing more resources, and what strategy would work best.
Currently the strategy that is promising is working with the Local Universities and implementing our program into their capstone/ practicum program for their students to be involved and get a consistent recruitment of volunteers every month.
This is the main OSSO local volunteer implementation program. This is to help OSSO begin to know how to start collecting all their resources and think of what strategies would work best for each orphanage. This creates conversation, critical thinking, organizational leadership, and finding resources to offer to their specific orphanage. This helps organize their internal organization.
The Next Step Moving Forward
The hope is to continue to keep finalizing the Ecuador Program Volunteer guide by meeting with the locals in Ecuador. Once the program is finalized and can be implemented, if it is practical the hope is to do the same for all the orphanages. This will consequently lead to OSSO needing the volunteer guide program to train their volunteers to do this strategic thinking and building of programs, and then hopefully improve the volunteer numbers for all orphanages.