After combing the city for months looking for a health-oriented NGO, a friend pointed me towards Acción Solidaria, which focuses on providing education and resources to combat VIH/SIDA (that’s HIV/AIDS to all you English-speakers) in Venezuela and other Spanish-speaking countries. Nestled in[...]
Posts Tagged ‘art’
Wanted: Brut Strength
The first time I saw G., the nurses had called him over to break a door down. The key had snapped off in the lock of the woodshed, and we needed the wood to make seed bed frames. The second time I saw G. at the psychiatric hospital, we needed someone with brute strength to bang [...][...]
November 15th, 2010 - 12:16 pm § in Good Ideas, Mexico
From Triggers to Trees: Palas Por Pistolas
The other day I received an email from GOOD magazine about a Mexican artist named Pedro Reyes. What makes Reyes so special that he should show up in my inbox? A couple of years ago he turned guns into trees. And no, I’m not joking. The city of Culiacán in western Mexico is rife with gang [...][...]
Street Art from the Southern Cone
Urban space as a live canvas. I can be a difficult person to travel with down here in the Southern Cone: walk two feet, stop, fish out camera, narrowly avoid traffic, squirrel away camera again. I once wandered Buenos Aires with a classmate who was working with graffiti artists. They told her (I va[...]
Cavorting Across the Cultural Divide
It’s been quite a momentous year for Chile, what with the earthquake, the inauguration of Sebastian Piñera (first right-wing leader since the dictatorship), their first World Cup in twelve years, and now, this September 18th, the two-hundredth anniversary of their independence. September 18th is [...]
Marketing Techniques
How do you interest someone in becoming a sponsor for a child in your program? How do you make your program more interesting to this potential sponsor than the tens of hundreds of other child-sponsor programs? How do you convince someone that the needs of your kids are great enough to warrant thei[...]
When it Comes to Fundraising, Be Persistent
I have been volunteering with the preschool classrooms at San Pablo la Laguna for two years, and with the Ayudame a Pintar Mi Futuro (APMF) project in San Pedro for over a year now. Every six months, I buy a lot of the work of local artisans and weavers and take it to my [...][...]
Finding Your Niche as a Short-Term Volunteer
Jennifer Yael Green is a writer and traveler who most recently spent a year as an English instructor in South Korea. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, she lives her life striving to write something worth reading, or to do something worth writing about. She spent several months volunteering in a vill[...]
