Journey So Far...

It was a routine Friday evening; I had finished all my work in advance so that I can sprint back home to enjoy the weekend. However that day, 16th December 2005, I had to go elsewhere – No. 99, Cox Town, Bangalore (the old address of iVolunteer, Bangalore office) to meet Ms. Antonette Lopez (earlier Center Manager).
I reached the iVolunteer office with lots of desire to change the world but to my surprise I saw a message, which said, “Stop thinking about making this world a better place, because intensions don’t make difference, Volunteers Do”.

Even Anna conveyed the same message during our brief talk on volunteering, different kinds of social issues and the various NGO involved. She explained certain basic etiquettes of being a volunteer (Do’s and Don’t) and she also made me realize that I need to start small but think big; Subsequent to my chat with Anna I decided to start with “environmental issues”. I felt happy about taking the right strides in fulfilling my societal goals. But even after 2 months no work or volunteering opportunities came my way, which was annoying me.

Then one fine day I received the iVolunteer-Monthly Newsletter of January 2006 where I read about volunteering opportunity in ASHA Foundation regarding AIDS Awareness. Though this wasn’t my initial choice of issue, which I wanted to work for, the impatience and also keenness to do something made me contact Anna, got the necessary details and reached ASHA Foundation.
Spoke comprehensively with Sunita (Counselor) and Dr. Glory Alexander (Director of ASHA Foundation) about the support which I can provide and also understood their requirements. Dr. Glory fixed Sunita as the Project Coordinator for all the volunteering activities on behalf of ASHA Foundation.

But managing volunteers or delegating volunteering activities was completely new for Sunita and volunteering was new to me. In essence we both didn’t know where to start or what to start or how to start?

But we didn’t have to worry since we had the able guidance of iVolunteer, which helped us form a small group of volunteers including me, Gaurav, Claire, Shilpa, Sayan, Vinod and Arun. We called ourselves iVolunteer-ASHA Group.

Sunita gave us exhaustive knowledge on HIV/AIDS and knowing the harmful effects of this virus further strengthened our desire to volunteer for this cause. All of us brainstormed a lot for over a month and decided upon our strategy of spreading AIDS Awareness.

The first event was publicizing the AIDS Helpline numbers through SMS to all our friends…a simple beginning but surprisingly it was a huge success. Counseling calls started pouring in on ASHA’s AIDS helpline. Thus the message was very clear “Many people require knowledge or awareness about AIDS and we as volunteers need to do provide it”.

And as in all stories after a good beginning the author says, “The rest is History….”. It is the scenario with our group as well;

However over the past few months the volunteers have changed but the initial desire, enthusiasm and zeal has remained the same and we have continued to spread awareness about HIV/AIDS to various section of the society in different forums through different means – SMS, EMAIL, Internet Communities, groups and blogs, Street Play, Presentations, Talk, Workshops, Display of Posters and games.

CLick Here ----> The event so far....