Example Volunteer Project:

An important part of the AOP Summer Immersion Program is a team volunteer project that the participants will participate in. The project will have groups of volunteers learning about and observing specific social conditions around the mountain town of Huancayo. The different teams will all work with different social problems and document them. Out of this exercise, we hope that the teams discover the "root cause" of the problems facing the Peruvian community in Huacayo. With local community members, the teams will be asked to come up with creative solutions to these fundamental problems and format them into a proposal to be considered for future funding. The solutions should be simple, feasible, and help improve life in the community.

Below is an example of simple but effective project proposal from a volunteer. This concept came out of careful study and observation of local life.

I have been working with a local volunteer group who runs a number of free schools outside of Huancayo. The schools are modest, often with no walls, and with very little school supplies. The children are between the ages of 6 and 14 years old. They mostly come from surrounding villages where their parents work as agriculural workers. The school is run by volunteers and it services around 40 children.

In my time at the school, I have been told, and have been able to see, that the children do not have enough to eat. They often are thin, small for their age, and have low levels of energy. Their diets consist of a small amount of rice, bread, and potatoes.

Malnutrition is such an issue among the students. A way to help this problem would be to help to set up a free lunch program attached to one of the schools.

The local people here would like to build a brick oven and I would like to make this more sustainable by constructing a solar oven. I would also like to add a sink and table to make a simple kitchen.

I was trying to think of ways that a solution to this problem could be sustainable and I thought that maybe if we could set up some of these families who don´t have much money for eggs and milk, with chickens or cows. In exchange the families could give some of what the animals produced to the meal program. A garden could be a possibility to grow vegetables.


Having this free source of food and methods for the schools to prepare the food at very low costs is the best way to fight malnutrition for these children.