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VOLUNTEER AND LEARN

This piece was published in the beginning of November  2018 on Perspectives of The Himalayan Times.


Since day one, ENGAGE wanted to create a sustainable way for local youths to volunteering, giving few hours in a week to serve important but neglected.

We knew that achieving impact through real volunteers, not full time nor paid, would not be easy and it would have required a strong investment in their personal development.

Indeed, the most resource intensive part of volunteering management is capacity building, equipping volunteers with the right skills to be able to make the difference. After all, volunteering is a two way street, giving but also receiving, learning and growing.

Volunteering is about personal development because a youth can put challenge herself, discover new passions or reexamine her future plans based on findings stemming from get engaged to help others.

Whatever ENGAGE is doing is about promoting leadership and personal development for a good cause. Below few examples of how ENGAGE is trying to do this.

Learning through Service: The ENGAGE Sport Coach Experience

We are recruiting a new batch of ENGAGE sport Coaches, local youth who love and practice sports and decide to serve by harnessing the power of inclusive sports. After all there is an increase in evidence that shows sports for development can truly make the difference and help achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs.

ENGAGE Sports Coaches are 11th, 12th and undergraduate students with a genuine passion for cricket, basketball and football. Their goal is to coach peers living with disabilities on sports like blind cricket, wheelchair basketball and deaf football.

The ENGAGE Sport Coach is a part time experience, with most of the service hours rolled out on Saturdays but it is also a rigorous, life transforming experience.

Each Coach undertakes a selection and then has to experience a compulsory 30 hours pre-service capacity building program that will lend them, at the end of the 10 months service experience, a certificate on leadership. Through this training, the ENGAGE Sport Coaches will learn about values based leadership, motivation, personal strengths, life coaching and mentoring, group dynamics, the importance of grit to develop passion and purpose. The experience is really about partnering with peers living with disabilities: the ENGAGE Sport Coaches are role models and always ready to show empathy and understanding towards the peers they are partnering with.

It is also a true learning experience as their peers with disabilities are themselves a great source of motivation and inspiration.

Personal Development through Action Learning: ENGAGE has been working in partnership with several schools and colleges to help their students to become better citizens by get engaged in social actions. We have very positive experiences in running short workshops to train members of social clubs but also with the purpose of reaching out those students not so interested in social causes. It is important to win over this wrong perception that only the sensitive students or those interested to social work should be involved at community level. Students are in charge with the facilitation of ENGAGE that always tries to bring its incredible partners, youths with disabilities, as speakers or facilitators. By connecting youths with and without disabilities, we are trying to forge new inclusive mindsets that will help make Nepal a truly inclusive nation.

Train the Future Leaders: ENGAGE partnered with Together for Nepal and Direct Koaching to organize a Train the Trainers programs particularly tailored made for human resources practitioners. With David Thirumur Kiran as coach and trainer, we would like to create a community of practitioners, what in jargon is called a “mastermind” group. Let’s just debunk the myth that just attending trainings will help improving yourself. Of course it can be beneficial but it is just the start of a personal journey of growth.

In short we believe that you can volunteer and learn, you can study and improve as person and you can also be an executive driven by ethical principles.

You have to learn and challenge yourself: Leadership development, at the end of the day, is a tool to help people become better persons.

Its spillover effects can directly contribute to make the society a better place.

Galimberti is the Co-Founder of ENGAGE, an NGO partnering with youths living with disabilities. For information about our programs, simran.engage@gmail.com or visit www.facebook.com/engagenepal

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