The English Empowerment Program (EEP) is a part of the Educate to Empower (E2E) movement by Home of Hope Inc (HOH), a San Francisco Bay Area based nonprofit. Home of Hope’s mission is to provide educational opportunities to empower disadvantaged and underprivileged youth to become self-sustaining adults of tomorrow. For the last few years, EEP has been using Skype as a tool to make a real and lasting social impact in the world. It has two different virtual volunteer programs that use Skype regularly to connect with disadvantaged youth in India.
The first is a weekly English class taught by Bay Area English teachers who volunteer their time to teach English to girls in a remote village in India in a customized manner, similar to personal tutoring. Rain or shine, the girls come to the classroom at six in the morning, before school starts, with an immense appetite to learn. Home of Hope has donated the technical facilities needed to hold this program for the girls and has seen a measurable impact made as a result, as assessed by test scores and increased employment opportunities.
The second program called Mentors Without Borders (MWB) was launched this past April. MWB is a fun and social way for Bay Area high school students to connect with similarly-aged abused orphaned youth in India for an hour a week over Skype. This program allows U.S. teens to make a meaningful impact on their peers across the globe. Small groups of volunteers here in the US are paired up with small groups of mentees in Inda. The kids discuss topics such as the importance of failure and rejection, time-management skills, identifying positive role models and emulating their admirable qualities, plus much more. This intimate, peer-to-peer interaction provides an invaluable avenue for the kids in India to not only practice their English in a fun way, but also build the much-needed confidence these orphans will require in order to survive and become successful, independent adults by the age of eighteen. This program (MWB) has been a huge success and is rapidly growing throughout the Bay Area.
“Similar to how education technology is the future of distance learning, I believe virtual volunteering is the future of global philanthropy. Giving students the opportunity to virtually volunteer, gives them insight into a world they may otherwise never witness, along with the intimate face-to-face connection needed to build relationships, just on a virtual platform.”
For more information on EEP and HOH, please visit www.eepHOH.org and www.hohinc.org.
