Public Health Project Manager

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Public Health Project Manager

Location

Volunteering at Warm Heart is an opportunity to immerse yourself in both authentic Thai culture and the beautiful mountains surrounding Warm Heart’s location in Phrao, northern Thailand. Local villagers will welcome you to share in the simple pleasure of day-to-day life, while Phrao’s north-central location provides the perfect base camp to explore not only Thailand but Laos as well. Phrao is also conveniently located just 89 kilometers north of Chiang Mai, Thailand’s second-largest city, where all the comforts of Western culture can be found.

Job Description

Warm Heart seeks a Public Health Project Manager to assist with the day-to-day operations and planning of its public health programs. Warm Heart operates a wide and changing variety of public health projects-- a day program for the elderly and disabled and other short term projects such as eyeglasses for schoolchildren or adapting home environments for disabilities. The volunteer may work on various aspects of any one of these projects, and while expertise in any specific program area is a plus, Warm Heart welcomes applicants with general public health, management, or program design background to assist with one or more of its health projects.

The Projects

The projects that currently require the most attention are the elders and disabled programs.

The Warm Heart day program for the elderly and disabled is the only such program in the district. It has just opened its doors. There is considerable work left to do to complete the development of its programs. Looking forward, there is also work to be done to open similar programs in additional sub-districts of Phrao, as well as to develop lower-cost interim measures such as visiting programs of a meals-on-wheels variety.

Phrao is served by 17 public health clinics, each of which is overwhelmed by the daily press of patients. Experienced nurses and 2 nd or 3 rd year nursing students make a huge difference to these clinics, which also provide an extraordinary learning experience.

Specific Requirements for this Position

This position requires a passion for public health, and a willingness to undertake a range of duties, from analyzing data to visiting communities. The ideal candidate will be:

• A graduating Public Health major or an MPH candidate
• An EMT or EMT/first aid instructor
• Someone with previous experience with the disabled and/or elderly
• Physical therapist
• Drivers's license

• Design and implement a tracking and metric system to measure the effectiveness of said regime
• Ensure that all public health volunteers have the resources and materials they need to do their jobs well.
• Assist with day-to-day activities within the Public Health Program, including community surveys, mobile visits, data entry, etc., as needed
• Assist with other projects, as assigned (e.g. volunteers are required to teach English for 2 hours of each week)

Working for a start-up NGO in a foreign country, especially one located in a small town, places special demands on volunteers. Volunteers will work with a small team of international volunteers in a Thai organization and community. The work is demanding and may be frustrating at times due to linguistic and cultural barriers.

Volunteers must, therefore, understand that Warm Heart requires individuals who have excellent interpersonal and diversity skills, lots of patience, perseverance, and endurance. Warm Heart also requires initiative-taking individuals who are self-starting, flexible and self-managing.

Other than being reasonably fluent in spoken and written English, there are no language requirements for volunteers, but Warm Heart encourages volunteers to take an active interest in learning basic Thai words and phrases of day-to-day courtesy. Warm Heart suggests that interns planning to stay longer than three months attend an intensive Thai course prior to starting work. Several such programs are readily available in Chiang Mai and last four weeks.

Time Commitment

A 2-3 month minimum commitment is required, but a longer commitment is much preferred. You will really begin to feel at home and know your job only after a few months, and Warm Heart will be able to give you much more responsibility if we know that you are not just passing through.

Why volunteer at Warm Heart?

Warm Heart does not need you to paint playground equipment. We have more important things to do and we expect volunteers to help us do them. If you are not ready to accept a lot of responsibility, volunteer someplace else, because we can’t use you. We serve 54,000 people who share four doctors. We teach business skills in a district where the average monthly income is $123. We care for minority children from isolated villages so that they do not drop out of school at 12 like their peers. We teach coffee cultivation to mountain people to improve land / water usage and to create alternatives to sex work for their daughters. We promote reforestation to restore the watershed and save the rice paddies of the valley. Bottom line: We serve real people with real needs and we need only volunteers ready to accept the intellectually, professionally, and personally challenging work we offer. Being a "volunteer" at Warm Heart means only that you are not being paid for your work; it does not mean that you carry any less responsibility for the promises we have made to the people of Phrao.

So why work at Warm Heart?

• You will make a real difference. You will meet the people whose lives you are changing and the changes that you will bring will be big: jobs, sustainable incomes, better health, and a brighter future.
• You will leverage your university experience. It is one thing to learn about global markets or grassroots development; it is an entirely different thing to do them yourself. What you have already studied will take on new meaning; what you study next you will learn in a whole new way.
• You will acquire professional skills that cannot be taught in the classroom. Every survey shows the same thing: companies think that their new employees are well educated, but lack interpersonal, teamwork and diversity skills. Warm Heart is a university of this stuff; you will return with amazing cross-cultural, multi-lingual teamwork and management skills. You will gain invaluable insight into how an NGO operates.
• If you are already a professional, you will have the pleasure of discovering that your professional skills have applications you never dreamed of! Volunteering at Warm Heart is not about unskilled labor; we need skilled professionals, whether database architects, graphic designers, accountants, operations managers, you name it.
• You will grow. You are on your own in a strange place working with a staff of Thais on the real problems of real people. It’s like a human growth hormone for the soul.
• You will meet cool people. Warm Heart volunteers come from everywhere from Australia to Vietnam. You will have the chance to develop close-knit friendships with other volunteers as well as the locals. Join in the spirited arguments about the true nature of the EU, whether Japan’s future is pan-Asian or pan-Pacific, who has the best - and the worst - food, art, architecture, weather, or people in the world. Fly home via Beijing or Seoul or Calcutta or Perth or any other destination you’d like to stop by.

Costs

Unlike many volunteer programs, Warm Heart does not charge a participation fee or require a donation. Warm Heart does provide volunteers with a low-cost housing and services package. (Phrao is too small for short-term volunteers to locate inexpensive housing and transportation on their own.) The Warm Heart package for those staying up to three months is currently $240 per month (subject to change, of course). It includes:

• Housing: Single room in a nearby guest house with screens, western toilet, hot water, and internet.
• Services: Document preparation and translation for work permits, required health documents, visa extensions, etc.

Volunteers should expect to spend about another $250 per month on food, gas, telephone and entertainment. How much more you spend will depend on how often you go to Chiang Mai for the weekend.

Visa Assistance

Warm Heart provides volunteers with assistance in obtaining necessary visas.

Apply

Complete the application form on https://warmheartworldwide.org/volunteer-application/. Warm Heart will contact you for additional information.