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December 2008
Dear users,
On December 5th, International Volunteer Day (IVD), UNV will celebrate the launch of the new Online Volunteering service website. Join us and help spread the word about the Online Volunteering service so that more development organizations can benefit from the support of online volunteers. You could, for example, use the online volunteering banner on your websites or in your email messages. You will find the banners on the Spread the Word page in the Resources section.
We would like to thank the many users who provided their valuable feedback on the new website by completing the short survey on the homepage; so far, 86 % of you have rated your overall satisfaction with the website as excellent or good. Some of you had questions about the status of applications, which we have addressed in this edition of the newsletter. If you have not yet taken the survey, you can still do so by going to www.onlinevolunteering.org.
To mark the 60th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights, observed on the 10th of December, this edition features the story of how online volunteers helped develop the capacity of Afghan Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) in human rights advocacy and strengthen women’s rights in the rural areas of northern Pakistan.
Best wishes,
The Online Volunteering service team
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THIS MONTH'S TOPICS
1. TIP: I Can No Longer Change the Status of Applicants and Volunteers
2. EXPERIENCE: Volunteers Support Human Rights in Afghanistan and Pakistan over the Internet
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1. TIP: I Can No Longer Change the Status of Applicants and Volunteers
Indeed, you no longer need to change the status of your volunteers on the new website in order to perform a certain action. Instead, all applications are listed in the “Active” list on the “Manage Volunteers” page of your organization account. All applicants will be considered “active” volunteers until you issue their certificates after they have completed their tasks or until you reject their applications if you do not wish to consider them for the assignment.
All applicants who will not be considered for an assignment can be removed in one step by checking the box in front of their names and hitting the Reject Applications button. The automated messages functionality will help you reduce the time you need to respond the volunteer applications. If you decide to deactivate the automated message that is sent by the system to candidates upon their rejection, make sure you communicate your decision individually.
The volunteers in the “Active” list can be sorted by pending actions (e.g.: submit feedback, issue certificate). This allows you to easily keep a clean list of active volunteers, and see at a glance which action to take next for each volunteer.
The simplified processes will help you to easily and quickly perform the key actions of volunteer management: select and reject volunteers, respond to applications, provide feedback on the collaborations and issue certificates.
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2. EXPERIENCE: Volunteers Support Human Rights in Afghanistan and Pakistan over the Internet
Online volunteers contributed their professional skills to building the capacity of Afghan Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) in human rights advocacy and to strengthening women’s rights in the rural areas of northern Pakistan.
The Association of Global Humanists and Ethics (AGHE), an NGO based in the remote Northern Areas of Pakistan, involved online volunteers in their women’s rights projects.
Bastien Bandi, an online volunteer from Switzerland, holds a Master’s degree in Management of Development. He devised a funding proposal for a Women’s Development Centre that AGHE had established in a village in north Pakistan with the objective of improving the welfare of women’s families and their status both within the family and within the community. “I had just left Pakistan where I had worked in the area of child protection. Working with AGHE on the development of a proposal was a very positive experience that helped me go further in my understanding of Pakistan and my contribution to the work done there”.
Ria Wilson, an experienced development practitioner from the U.K., developed a funding proposal for AGHE’s Women&Family assistance project, which aims at reducing violence against women. “Ria Wilson’s role has been very impressive. Even after completion of her online assignment, she is working with us on the women development project as a volunteer. She has also planned to initiate a project in the UK for the promotion of women-made handicrafts. We really pay tribute to her attachment with us for such a long time,” says Ijaz Hussain, AGHE president. The funding proposal helped the organization get small grants from local donors and to build partnerships with them.
Online volunteers also developed a training manual that was used to enable community trainers to disseminate knowledge on the role and rights of women and increase awareness in families and communities about the changing role of women. Ijaz Hussain, “The manual developed by the online volunteers was very useful for us to make the master training programme more successful and interactive. This initiative has encouraged other local and regional NGOs to put women’s rights on their agenda”.
The Afghan NGO Bureau for Reconstruction and Development (BRD) involved online volunteers in all aspects of their project to enhance the capacity of CSOs in human rights advocacy through the training of their human rights trainers, and establishing a network of Afghan CSOs working for human rights promotion and advocacy.
Online volunteer Filipina Santos from the Philippines has 23 years of experience in rural development involving NGOs and civil society organizations. She supported the design of the training programmes for CSO trainers in Human Rights advocacy and the training curriculum, as well as the establishment of a Human Rights advocacy network in Afghanistan to foster collaboration between CSOs, local and international Human Rights organizations, Human Rights experts and volunteers.
Based on the training curriculum, a team of 5 volunteers with backgrounds in law, education and business administration worked together with BRD staff on the development of training manuals. Elena Denisova-Schmidt, online volunteer: ”It was a fascinating and inspiring experience. On the one hand, I was able to build on my vast professional, scientific as well as personal experience in the area of Intercultural Competencies. On the other hand, I discovered the parallels between intercultural learning and democratic education and experienced that in our team – volunteers from all over the world – we were living these intercultural and democratic values on a daily basis.”
Nirav Khichadia, an Indian systems engineer, developed a database to store information of CSOs active in Human Rights advocacy and local and international HR experts and volunteers to promote partnerships and collaboration and promote HR activities at the grassroots level.
Khan Agha Dawoodzai, Programme Director: “BRD's online volunteers have played a significant role in the development of the organization. The impact of the contributions of its online volunteers is testament to the effectiveness of volunteering online.”
