The GVN Community Fund was established to support the work of our partners in supporting communities in need. We choose to work with organisations formed by people from within the local community, who are in the best position to determine their needs. As well as providing them with volunteers, we also aim to supply our partner organisations with resources so that they are able to continue and enhance their work in their local communities.

The Community Fund allows visitors to our site to contribute to the work of the Global Volunteer Network and our partners. Our partner organisations have indicated to us the areas within their programs that would most benefit from donations; please click on the links on the side for more details. We also offer the GVN Community Initiative (see below), which allows donors to take a more active role in the fundraising process.

100% of money donated to the Community Fund goes directly to the project concerned. Projects include:

buying land to extend forest reserves in Ecuador
providing supplies such as pens, pencils, markers, paper, chalk, chalkboard erasers, textbooks, paint for the classrooms, and classroom furniture for schools in Ghana
plastering and painting the Shree Bhairum Secondary School in Nepal
providing extra meals and building a fence for the orphanage in Vietnam
purchasing supplies and creating educational literature for the local community for the Ghana Environmental Program

The GVN Community Initiative allows volunteers to take a more active role in raising money for our projects. Our current Community Initiative feature project is raising money for a school in Uganda. We are raising funds to build a school to provide educational opportunities for children who have lost their parents due to the AIDS virus. The Global Volunteer Network�s Mount Kilimanjaro Climb offers participants the opportunity to hike to the top of one of the most beautiful and prestigious mountains in the world, as well as the chance to visit the school in Uganda that will benefit from the fundraising.

Our partner in Uganda, the African Child Foundation, offers education to AIDS orphans and needy children in Ndejje. A total of 150 children have benefited in this program so far. There are still many children who the foundation has been unable to help, due to a lack of resources; Ndejje is comprised of eight villages and there are more than 30 000 HIV/AIDS orphans and needy children in the community. About a quarter of these children attend school under the Universal Primary Education scheme, which is a government program to pay partial school fees for four children per family. There are two government aided primary schools under this program within the Ndejje area.

However, as is often the case in Africa, the government aided schools are overcrowded, especially in the rural areas. The ratio of children to teachers is between 120 to 200 children per teacher. The teachers are poorly paid, often only making a minimum salary of forty US dollars per month, which compels the teachers to skip some lessons in search for ways to supplement their income. As a result the children's standard of education suffers, and children often drop out of school at an early age, raising a generation of unskilled youths with no parental guidance and no education to compete in the job market.

The African Child Foundation is committed to addressing this problem by constructing and establishing a primary school in the Ndejje area. The school will focus on the children who have not been attending school, due to a lack of school fees and other social problems. They hope this will help to mitigate the impacts of an illiterate society and provide these children with a future. The school will supplement the government's efforts to educating Uganda's children. The school will be integrated with vocational training such as computer application, carpentry and tailoring. The school will also integrate children from well off families within Ndejje to help subsidise the costs. The plan is for the school to accommodate between 500 and 1,000 children.

For this main initiative, we have developed a microsite devoted to the Ugandan school project: http://communityfund.volunteer.org.nz/.

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