Social Development

Unlike many other international volunteer organizations, Peace Corps does not require a financial commitment from the volunteer.  Many international organizations require volunteers to provide some sort of funding to support both their stay and the organization with which they are volunteering.  Not only are these organizations unable to provide the financial support to their volunteers that Peace Corps does, but they are also unable to provide many of the other government benefits afforded by Peace Corps.  For example, Peace Corps provides significant language, cross-cultural, and technical training to all volunteers in-country before they begin their service as volunteers, not to mention the continuing training offered to volunteers throughout their two years of service.  Furthermore, Peace Corps is able to ensure the health and safety of all volunteers by offering full medical coverage and security support from the US Embassy in country.  Nevertheless, it goes without saying that an organization that is able to offer such a wide range of support and benefits will also place certain requirements and expectations upon and the behavior and work of its volunteers.  You would be hard pressed to find another international volunteer organization that places such specific and comprehensive expectations upon volunteer service as Peace Corps does with its 10 Core Expectations.

While Peace Corps’ requirements and expectations can at times be a bit overwhelming, I would argue that the benefits provided by Peace Corps outweigh the restrictions afforded by Peace Corps’ expectations.  One such benefit is the volunteer access to the Small Project Assistance (SPA) granting program provided in conjunction with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) .  The SPA program is able to provide many benefits to volunteers and the communities in which they work.  Through the SPA program, volunteers together with their community counterparts are able to obtain funds to support a project in their community provided that they use effective Project Design and Management (PDM) techniques in the planning, implementation, and evaluation phases of their project.

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Last summer, two of my community counterparts and I designed one such project and submitted a proposal to the SPA program here in Jordan.  We developed the vision, as a stated desire from the community, to improve the overall English language skills of the members of our community.  After attending a Peace Corps sponsored PDM training we developed this vision from merely a desirable goal to a concrete action plan of steps that would improve English language skills and confidence in the community.  We conducted meetings with influential community leaders to promote our project and refine our ideas and then submitted our plan in the form of a project proposal to the SPA program.

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Installing the projector screen

Our project plan was approved and we received a grant totaling 3,404 Jordanian Dinars ($4,807.91 USD) to implement our plan to improve the English language skills and confidence in our community.  We partnered with the local branch of the Jordanian Ministry of Social Development, an organization that has offered little more than preschool classes to the community since its inception over thirty years ago.  The director of the Society for Social Development in our community offered us a large and disgusting room to use for our project.  Our initial goal was to renovate this room to provide an effective space with appropriate materials and equipment for English language teaching and learning.  While the community did provide many hours of labor, as well as equipment, supplies, and cash, the majority of our project funds from SPA were spent during this initial phase of renovating and stocking our English classroom.

Working on the room

By the early part of the Fall Semester of the school year, our classroom was ready for use and our classes commenced.  We were able to offer a full slate of courses ranging from students age 10 through adult.  I was tasked with teaching Adult Conversational English.  Like all our courses, my classes were three hours per week and segregated by gender. The majority of the students in the adult classes were in their twenties or early thirties, and teaching these courses provided me with a wonderful opportunity to develop relationships in my community and make, separately, both male and female friends.

I, however, would prefer not to talk about what I did, but rather I would like to focus on the support provided, and the skills gained, by the members of my community.  As I stated above, SPA granted us 3,404 JOD, but I believe it is significant to note that our total project cost was over 7,400 JOD (approximately $10,500) meaning that the community donated 54% of the total cost of this project.  One of the biggest donations came from two Jordanian community members, who were not involved in the initial project design and planning, and who each volunteered to teach nine hours of youth English classes every week for the semester.  In addition to working as full-time teachers at schools in Mafraq City, each of these volunteers returned to our community in the afternoons and evenings to teach three separate English classes every week.  When you add their excellent volunteer efforts to my Adult Conversation classes, then we provided a regular offering of 24 hours of English classes every week.

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While our attendance in our male classes was not as high as we had hoped, our female classes remained full throughout the semester and we did even have a small core group of males in regular attendance in our classes.  We are confident that these students have benefited from these English courses not only from their continued presence and participation in our courses, but also from conversations with their parents.  Almost every week a parent would come to thank us and inform us that he or she, as well as his or her child’s primary English teacher at school, has noticed significant improvement in his or her child’s English skills and English confidence.

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The greatest change, however, that came out of this project, in my opinion, is not the English skills and confidence that our students gained, but rather the local Society for Social Development’s increased capacity to provide quality programming and services for the community.  As I mentioned above, before I began to work with Society for Social Development in my community they had, for decades, offered little more than preschool programs for local youth.  The current director of the Society is younger than I am, has worked for the Society for a shorter period of time than I have been in Jordan, and, aside from being a public school teacher, had no prior experience working in community or social development.  Despite his youth and inexperience, he proved to be a fabulous counterpart who was fully committed to both our English project and to development of the Society as a whole.  Unlike many Jordanians, he consistently demonstrated the leadership and management attributes of initiative, effective time-management, an eagerness to learn, regular communication, and timely follow-through.

In fact, during the course of this project, he independently was able to secure a second grant from a different international development organization to improve the facilities in the rest of the center and offer improved access and services to students with disabilities.  He has told me on numerous occasions that through our work together on our English project he has gained the capacity to design and manage projects and obtain funding for these projects for the benefit of the Society and the community as a whole.  Without the skills gained in our project together, he never would have secured the second grant from the other independent organization.

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I’ve talked in previous posts how essential my local relationships and counterparts are to my ability to achieve success in my projects and I cannot emphasize enough how lucky I am to be in a community where I am valued and supported by my local counterparts.  In reality, my work in Jordan is quite fun and relatively easy thanks to the people with whom I work.  The director of the local Society for Social Development epitomizes this concept of an ideal counterpart.  Not only is he one of my best Jordanian friends but he is also a man who is committed to learning the appropriate knowledge, skills, and strategies to do whatever it takes to develop our community.

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