You can help!

As you sit at your computers, reading about the amazing people that live in Vanuatu and some of the extreme challenges they face every day, I bet you often wish you could do something to help improve the lives and the opportunities for these unique and wonderful people. Well good news - now you can! By following the link below you can donate any amount of money, however small, to help the Gender and Development committee work to provide support for the country's youth.

But what is the GAD committee? We are a group of eight volunteers who meet three times a year and try to address issues of gender inequality, gender-based violence, and others in Vanuatu. As our mission statement says, our goal is to "encourage cooperation between women and men to build strong families, communities, and nation." This encompasses a broad range of activities from raising awareness of domestic violence to helping people re-evaluate gender roles to providing training for Peace Corps volunteers in GAD related issues. But one of the most important things the GAD committee does is to focus on educating the youth of Vanuatu and helping foster confidence, leadership skills, healthy relationships and much more. As we focus on empowering the young people of this country we are ensuring that the next generation of Ni-Vanuatu will have the strength and the tools to improve the country from within. By providing training we can hope to put into place a sustainable development plan that will flourish without volunteers and will hopefully eventually make Peace Corps's presence in Vanuatu unnecessary.

A way to accomplish this is by running BILD (Boys In Leadership Development) and GLOW (Girls Leading Our World) camps in different locations around the country. These camps are a great way to gain access to and engage the country's youth and have been proven time and time again to be effective. Although the Peace Corps is extremely supportive of the GAD committee and our mission, unfortunately for the moment there is no available funding for us to run these camps. So instead, we look to you! You can help us accomplish our goals by donating any amount of money. Any gift of any size is greatly appreciated and gets us one step closer to our goal. So if you want to help the youth of Vanuatu, or get a nice little tax deduction, or if you just want to support your favorite Peace Corps blogger, please follow the link and donate anything you can. Thank you!!

https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=donate.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=461-043