Asociación TransAmericana de Voluntarios En Solidaridad (ATRAVES) is an International association with legally recognized nonprofit organizations in both Nicaragua and the United States. ATRAVES works to build connections among communities, organizations and people in Nicaragua and internationally to support development, health and educational efforts in Nicaragua. Our mission is to create just conditions in impoverished communities in Nicaragua by joining with the communities to promote solidarity across borders, harnessing the motivation and energy of this connection to define, articulate, and build mutually in each place community development, integral health, and humanizing education.
Our network includes schools, clinics, artisan cooperatives, women’s groups and others. Our goal is to provide the organization and resources that these groups need in order to succeed in reducing the causes and effects of poverty in the communities that they serve. One way in which we do this is through our international volunteer program, which helps us form a build a broad community of people with a personal stake in equitable development in Nicaragua. This network is an incredible resource for the ATRAVES Communities in their political, intellectual and financial development.
ATRAVES’s model effectively couples local control with international resources—two things that are not mutually exclusive, but that often come into tension in the context of globalization and international aid. Large international organizations are often uninterested in aiding small, specialized projects, or may seek to impose their own vision at the expense of community involvement and empowerment. However, community groups may lack the resources and expertise required to carry out their projects, so connecting them with international volunteers is an effective way to resolve this tension. With careful planning and orientation, volunteers bring the direct benefits of their labor, occasional financial and material donations, and the less-direct, but long term benefits of solidarity with the community. ATRAVES works with individual volunteers as well as groups to connect them to or develop projects that speak to their interests and skills as well as address the needs and wants of the host community. In this model, project specialization and community autonomy in development are not only enabled but encouraged, producing more democratic--and ultimately more effective--ways to fight poverty in Nicaragua.
Comments