Description
You Are What Keeps Us Running!
As a development organization with a specific focus on fostering a steady flow of international volunteers, we aim to bring knowledge, skills and resources from a global pool of enthusiastic people like you to help solve local problems in both rural and urban areas of Ghana. The life experiences that you bring to the table complement local knowledge to create solutions that we would have otherwise not conceived, and that is what makes our collaboration so valuable.
Promoting volunteerism as our central tenet provides us with other benefits as well; This structure allows Hamlet of Hope to accomplish its goals without a large staff and the high overhead expenses that come along with it, ensuring that a greater percentage of the money we receive goes towards the development projects themselves as opposed to keeping a large bureaucratic structure intact. We also never find ourselves paralyzed when money from overseas donors is not available because our development projects are continually supported by funding from volunteer visits as well as the tours that we provide to non-volunteers. By implementing this structure, we can generate a financial backing that allows us to continue our work on a grassroots level with a consistent momentum.
We Offer You Complete Cultural Immersion
Being that our organization is based on the kindness of volunteers, we make sure to return their kindness with some of Ghana's legendary hospitality. Hamlet provides accomodation for volunteers in homestays with families in the communities that they will be working in, where they'll be provided with filtered water and home-cooked Ghanaian cuisine. Not only is this method much cheaper than lodging in a hotel, but we find that this is quite simply the best way to truly get to know the culture and values of Ghanaian people... and our volunteers agree! On top of this, volunteers are accompanied by professional and seasoned project managers and field officers with an immense knowledge of the communities in which they work. All of this is to provide you with a genuine taste of what it is like to live in Ghana and make your experience more fruitful. We believe that cultural immersion will not only inform your work as a volunteer, but will also prove to be one of the most valuable things that you take home from your experience.
*If a homestay is not available, then alternative accomodation can be provided.
Community Empowerment is Our Guiding Principle
Hamlet of Hope acknowledges the inadequacies that have existed in the chain of change over the past few decades. We have seen that the top-down approach to development has proven to be ineffective and we wish to serve as a living counterargument to that model.
In order to accomplish this, our work must embody the perspective that the people themselves should be a part of the development process from day one. We must be in constant dialogue with community based organizations for us to determine what practices are the most effective in our pursuit of development objectives that are meaningful to the people they are designed to benefit. From that dialogue, we create training programs to ensure that facilitators' skills match the requirements for effective project management, particularly taking into account the specific needs and wishes of communities where work will be done.
This people-centered approach is centered on harnessing participants' abilities to diagnose and solve development problems, keeping in mind that every individual has valuable knowledge, skills and experiences that they bring to the table. The staff and volunteers at Hamlet are consistently encouraging participants to utilize their diverse array of talents, such that they can eventually become facilitators in their own right and others may learn from them. While our volunteers will be acting as advocates and advisors for the Ghanaian people, it is our hope that through this work, the greatest advocates for these resource-challenged communities will eventually be the citizens themselves.
