Long-Term Volunteers Needed

Common Hope is currently seeking five full-time, long-term volunteers to support our programs in Guatemala. The following positions are yearlong commitments:

• Vision Team Coordinator (2 positions, March start date)
• Speech Therapist (March start date)
• Housing Volunteer (March start date)
• Volunteer Physician (June start date)

For more information or to apply, visit their website.

Life of Hope Ministries regularly organizes and hosts short term mission groups to Guatemala.  Their organization has several field partners who serve in and around Guatemala City, Guatemala.  Because the mission statement of Life of Hope Ministries identifies their focus to be on street children and children at high risk, their efforts are located in the poorest areas of the city and surrounding communities.  The children they serve do not have access to preventative or basic health care except through the efforts of our field partners.  Life of Hope has exposure to 600-700 children on a weekly basis and hundreds of families.
 
Life of Hope Ministries is seeking medical teams and general service teams to serve in Guatemala on 7-10 day trips.  They will assist in logistical planning and scheduling of the trips. They will host the groups while on the ground to increase the effectiveness and safety of the trip.
 
For additional information you may view their website: www.lifeofhope.org, email:info@lifeofhope.org, or phone toll free-1-888-745-4705.

In the past decade, nearly 4,000 women and young girls have been murdered in Guatemala. Many of them, including girls as young as 10, were tortured and raped, their bodies left in public places.  As a result, women have coined the term “femicide” to describe these widespread, gender-based killings committed with impunity. Of the 383 women’s murder cases in 2003, more than 300 are still awaiting results from police investigations today.

In response to the murders, women in Guatemala are organizing to protect each other. MADRE’s sister organization, the Women Worker’s Committee in Guatemala, has created neighborhood watch groups in their communities. Sandra Gonzales of the Women Worker’s Committee describes the violence as “getting worse every day.” However, she says “with your help we can continue to defend human rights for all women.”

You can help these women by providing whistles and flashlights for the neighborhood watch. According to Sandra, “flashlights and whistles are essential to providing security for women and girls in our community,” where there are no street lights and no reliable police protection.

If you don’t have the supplies to donate, but still want to make a contribution, you can make a monetary donation to help alleviate the costs of shipping the whistles and flashlights to Guatemala.

To find out more about MADRE, please click here.

To our bilingual friends…we have a volunteer opportunity that you can do from your couch!  As you know, our blog currently profiles grassroots groups working on the ground in Guatemala.

Eventually, our blog will be bilingual.  Until then, we don’t want to miss out on the many groups that have websites only in Spanish.

We are looking for a bilingual individual who can post profiles of Spanish speaking charities in English on our blog.

If you are interested, please add a comment to this post, or click on the “Contact Us” button, above.  Feel free to pass this link along!!

Help Safe Passage celebrate 10 years of success moving children and families beyond the Guatemala City garbage dump.  Safe Passage is in search of 15 – 20 communities around the world that are willing to host a 5K walk/run as their community’s annual fundraiser for Safe Passage. 

***Will you host an event?***

Their goal: to have thousands of people running and walking together, in friendship and hope and solidarity, to honor Hanley’s vision of helping families build better lives for themselves beyond the garbage dump. The children in Guatemala will be running a 5K as well.

Please contact them if you’re interested in helping to host this first-time international event. They will assist you along the way with a checklist of steps to get you successfully to race day on Sunday, September 12, 2010.

It’s easy. It’s fun. It’s healthy. It’s a chance to build your own community while connecting with theirs.

Contact outreach@safepassage.org or (207) 846-1188 to sign up or to request more information.

Help Guatemala without ever leaving your hometown!  Sharing the Dream is looking for people all over the U.S. who are willing to volunteer to sell products through Sharing the Dream on a one time or on-going basis.  This would be a way for people to help out the people in Guatemala without having to go there.    

Products could be sold at churches, schools, home sales and other venues.  The crafts come already marked and ready to go.  They just need to put them out, keep track of what they sell and send the unsold items back to the Sharing the Dream store in South Dakota.  This could be a one-time thing or several times a year.

Sharing the Dream is working hard to create sustainability for their groups.  They are working with artisans on design and marketing, and trying to move them towards making their own designs and finding their own markets.   This is a long process but they are making huge strides.

For more information, please email the group at info@SharingTheDream.org.

As part of our site’s design process, we are seeking a volunteer to act as a liaison between the Clinic Link organization, and the Guatemalan Ministry of Health.  If you know anyone who is interested, you can email them the link below, or click here to view the description yourself.

Link:  http://www.idealist.org/if/i/en/av/VolunteerOpportunity/183954-21/c

We have made significant progress on our Version 1 design.  So, now Clinic Link is recruiting some volunteers to round out our technical team. If you know any techies (regardless of location) who may be interested, please send them to this link. There are four volunteer opportunities posted towards the bottom.  If you would rather cut and paste the link into an email, here is the URL:   http://www.idealist.org/if/i/en/av/Org/205681-267.

If you have any questions, please either leave a comment below, or click here to send me an email.

Hearts in Motion is currently seeking volunteers to staff its 2010 trips:

In addition to volunteering on trips, there are many tasks that can be done in their office, a person’s local area, or on a computer.  If you are interested, please click here to get more information.