Community Volunteer Meeting

Community Volunteer Meeting

Along with sponsoring children and conducting research, Cheerful Hearts Foundation is also focused on community outreach. We are currently conducting a project in which about 20 community members in were trained on the importance of child education and the dangers of child labour. After their training, they agreed to spend two hours, 2-3 days a week, sharing this information with the people in their community. Each month we sit down with the volunteers and see how their outreach work is going. The project will run for five months and will be evaluated when it finishing in October. We are currently running this program in Nyanyano, but we hope to extend it to the other community as well.

It was interesting listening to the volunteers talk about their successes and struggles while working on the project. One of the biggest concerns for the volunteers was gathering getting personal information such as names and ages from the individuals that they talk with. In order to evaluate the community impact of the project, it is important to keep data on who the volunteers educating, but many parents will refuse to give their names to the volunteers. We talked about various ways to fix this problem. First, we discussed how it is important to not be robotic when talking to families. Volunteers must be personable and establish a connection instead of simply trying to fill out a questionnaire or disseminate information. In order to work in the community, volunteers must create a connection with their neighbors so that their message will actually be heard and the project’s mission will be effective. It is also import to try to get the community to support the cause. This is one reason why community volunteers involved in the outreach. Along with the education and information volunteers must explain our mission, in order to form a partnership with our organization and the community.

Volunteers also realized that many parents misunderstood the purpose of the project. When parents see people with clipboards walking around the village, they automatically expect the individual to be signing up children for sponsorships. Even though Cheerful Hearts does sponsor children to go to school, families need to know that we cannot simply walk around the town writing down names of children to sponsor. There is a very specific interview process that Cheerful Hearts needs to conduct before sponsoring a child. They need to make sure that the child fits our mission statement working with child labour and trafficking, and we must evaluate whether the child will attend school and use the opportunity given to them. Even though we would love to sponsor all children to attend school, limited resources force us to priorities when distributing sponsorship. It is especially when I am walking around town as a foreigner, that the initial belief is that I am there to give them money and sponsor their child. The Ghanaian volunteers have these same problems so we discussed the importance of being clear that the current project is working on advocacy and not sponsorships.

There were two stories that stand out from the meeting. One was about a mother who told a community volunteer that she was not going to send her daughter to school because her older child, who was in high school, had become obstinate and was poorly behaving due to his time in the schools. Internally, I laughed at this notion that it was school that made teenagers obstinate and rebellious, as it seems to be a universal state for the teenage mind; however, we talked about how it is important that we encourage parents to control their children and be active in their lives. School is not the enemy, but instead we need to give parents new tools to discipline children. We discussed methods for developing a child’s respect and punishments for misbehavior, trying not to focus on caning which is the only option that most parents consider. One of the younger volunteers (there are several high school students that have been trained to try to talk with their peers about the importance of education) described a household that she came to where she found a daughter not allowed to go to school and was being abuse by her aunt. Even as a high school student, she knew that the physical abuse was not alright, but did not know how best to help the younger girl. We made sure to discuss the issue of child abuse at our meeting. She will be going back to the house this week with adult (and a respected member of the community) in order to address the physical violence that is going on behind the closed doors. With the training that these volunteers have received, they must act as the first line of attack against the abuse and exploitation of the children of the community. Children should not be beaten in their homes or working on the shore, but instead should be in school, having a childhood and creating a future for themselves.

I believe the community outreach and education that is done by Cheerful Hearts is just as important as sponsoring students or conducting research. Many individuals in Nyanyano (and even more so in Senya and Fetteh) have not completed primary school. It is not always that they beat their children or sell them to traffickers, because they are bad people, but instead it is due to a lack of knowledge. The more that the community can work together and educate each other about the child abuse and exploitation occurring in their village, the safer the children will be.