Today’s blog post comes from Perry Teicher, a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer who served in Kazakhstan from 2007-2009.  This is the second of five posts about his Peace Corps service.  Read the first post here.

The Volunteer Club’s success came when the volunteers and buddies began to take the program into their own hands.  A key component of the project was a buddy program, where we paired disabled youth with volunteers.  A year after we started this program, two events took place on the same day that helped us realize how far we had come in the year.  One of the volunteers, Zhanar, planned a pizza party for volunteers and their buddies with a grant she won.  Zhanar was incredibly active at her university, but chose to spend her time with the Volunteer Club.  That night, one of the buddies, Nuriman, hosted a birthday party that was well attended by the volunteers.  Neither my counterpart nor I had any role in planning the party.  I stopped by the party that evening – even after spending hours together eating pizza earlier in the day, a huge group of our volunteers and buddies were still together, celebrating as friends with people they had not known existed only a few months earlier.

As volunteers and buddies developed friendships, my Kazakhstani counterpart Maral and I shifted our strategy to better enable this change.  Rather than planning events, we provided additional training and mentoring opportunities.  Volunteers wanted to write grants to fund new project ideas, we worked with the volunteers to refine the projects and find additional support to run these programs.  As volunteers wanted to do more, we made sure that the resources were available.

Many parents of volunteers were initially uncomfortable with their children spending time with disabled children. Working alongside my Kazakhstani counterpart, we adjusted our strategy to deal with this resistance, integrating volunteers and buddies into leadership positions and empowering them to take ownership of the club.  The volunteers are their own best advocates – when they could go to their parents and show the impact, that was much more effective than any training we could devise.

More than two years after the club launched, there are now over 100 active volunteers.  Our starting cadre have graduated and many have left the city to pursue careers and advanced degrees, but they continue to stay involved, using their volunteer experience as a basis for working with others.  In Aktobe, the Volunteer Club has become known as a high point of youth involvement, invited to participate in activities throughout the area.  Peace Corps Kazakhstan usually only places three Peace Corps Volunteers consecutively at an organization.  After the volunteer that replaced me, my organization already had three volunteers.  Due to the success of the Volunteer Club and its growth as an independent organization, the Volunteer Club itself has received its own Peace Corps Volunteer.

Perry Teicher is the Repair the World Fellow, 2010-2011.  He served in Peace Corps Kazakhstan (2007-2009).  Feel free to e-mail him at .