Summer Youth Camp: Volunteering for Development

The desire and need to develop a successor generation for social development led CODE-NGO to initiate its Youth Volunteering Program in 2013. This program intends to offer volunteering opportunities for young people in CODE-NGO’s programs and projects as a way to introduce them to social development work. In turn, the volunteers are able to provide the needed extra hands, given the organization’s lean personnel.

A major accomplishment of this initiative was the conduct of CODE-NGO’s 1st Young Writers’ Summer Camp last April 22 to May 4, 2013. With the theme “Volunteerism towards Excellence”, it provided an avenue for volunteers to develop their writing and research abilities through exposure and hands-on experience; to instil positive attitude, to heighten motivation and develop teamwork and good collaboration skills towards becoming committed agents for social development advocacies. The summer camp brought together fourteen (14) young volunteers for a 2-day workshop on doing ethical research and writing for development for mainstream and social media. After the workshop, the volunteers were deployed to ten (10) host CSOs (civil society organizations) in Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao for a 5-day participant-observation research and to write about how the CSOs they visited contribute to empowering the poor and improving the lives of the communities they serve.

The volunteers produced 30 articles and 2 case studies on their featured CSOs and their significant contribution to society. A volunteer wrote about a community healthcare program run by the Ibaloi tribe of the Ubod-Apuan sitio in Benguet, while another featured an empowered Ibaloi woman leader. Some of these articles were shared at social networking sites, while the rest will be submitted to some major broadsheets for publication.

All in all, the volunteer writers believed that the camp created a positive impact to their personal growth and increased their appreciation of development work and their passion to do positive change for the country.