Home > News & Events

News & Events

Global Xchange, all set for volunteering

The new set of volunteers who shall compose this year’s Global Xchange teams has been selected. They come from all over the Philippines and are currently raising funds to benefit its various global citizenship activities, which aim to highlight volunteerism and community development.

Volunteering is at the heart of Global Xchange and this goes far beyond their work projects. The programme aims to strengthen the quality and quantity of volunteering by young people and use this as a platform to promote a wider range of civic engagement by all.

Nine Filipino volunteers will join their British counterparts in the UK for 6 months. And this year’s Global Xchange is particularly exciting as the Philippines Country Management Team, VSO and the British Council are hosting two simultaneous volunteer exchanges, which will both commence this March 2007. Each team is composed of nine Filipino and nine British volunteers age 18 to 25 years old who will be deployed in the UK for 3 months from March to June and in the Philippines for another 3 months from June to September. The host communities of Team 58 and Team 62 include Southampton-Eastleigh-Davao and Bradford-Cagayan de Oro-Iligan, respectively.

The volunteers will undergo a series of training geared to preparing them for a 6-month volunteer placement in host communities.

Together, in cross-cultural counterpart pairs, they live with host families and work in host communities. They also work on a global citizenship project specifically aimed at raising awareness of development and diversity within their host communities. The program impacts most directly on the young people who volunteer, but its power extends to the families who host them, the community projects with which they work with and the wider communities in which they live. For all these participants in the program, Global Xchange demonstrates the potential and promotes the values of active global citizenship.