Philanthropy for Equitable Justice and Peace

With the ongoing pandemic and necessary precautions that are mandatory to take, personal as well as professional lives of ours have been affected. One of our core programs, the Volunteers program had also been impacted. Since the coronavirus cases started increasing from March 2020 to date, the programs to run in-person have been near to impossible. During the lockdown, the program officer was in close communication with as many volunteers as possible through various social media chatting platforms. To date, Tewa has more than 900 trained volunteers and 30% of them are still actively engaged in Tewa. Volunteers of Tewa used to participate in different local fundraising events, discussion programs focused on the volunteers, and refreshers programs. During the lockdown, Tewa came up with the idea to start weekly sessions via zoom. The weekly session is focused on all the volunteers. This session was focused solely on volunteers and was about skill sharing. Any interested volunteer with any skill, can lead the session and share about their skill with other interested volunteers. The session was conducted every Sunday via Zoom. Through this skill-sharing session, 117 volunteers have learned different skills. Like, learning how to make chayote pickle, making compost and liquid fertilizer, waste management skill, and making handbags. Also, our volunteers learned about basic skills in poem writing and making liquid hand wash. Apart from this training, Tewa also focused on the well-being of the volunteers. During ongoing pandemic and lockdown, the mental health of people has been affected due to an increase in stress and only staying indoors. So, we had also organized Psycho counseling and well-being session for our volunteers. The facilitators for all the sessions were our volunteers. These sessions had helped our volunteers interact with each other during this chaotic time, distracting themselves and giving them space to share, learn, and be carefree.