📝 Detailed information
🏢 About the local organisation
Hope Center is located in Ba Dinh district, near city center. This is a very crowded place with many shops. It takes around 30 minutes to get there from VPV office by bus.
Main Aims and Activities
The aim of the program is to jointly bring care, love and happiness to the children through volunteers’ activities.
The Hope Centre is a non-profit, non-government day care organization based in Hanoi for the care of mentally impaired children. This centre was founded in 1997 by Vietnamese enthusiastic teachers, and then in 2002, it was expanded with the support from an American NGO.
Number of staff: 11 teachers. All of them graduated from Hanoi National University of Education or have background in special education. Ms. Nga, the director, is not also a teacher but also a doctor of Pediatrics.
Number of children: about 70 disabled children divided into 4 classes.
The centre’s mission is to provide opportunities for children with mental impairment to receive an education, and to feel included with their local community. In particular, the centre provides assistance for those children suffering from developmental disabilities including Down's Syndrome, Autism and Cerebral Palsy. As well as early grade academic learning, the education programs include physical education and therapy, yoga, painting and poetry.
💼 What the programme involves
Here are some possible tasks that you can do there:
- Caring for disabled children
- Assisting teachers in classrooms
- Assisting the teachers and children during lunch time
- Calling for charity or Subscription (depends on volunteers)
Working hours:
A usual working day could be from 9 am to 4 pm with a lunch break from 11 am to 2 pm.
Travel to work: 40 minutes by bus.
🏠 Accommodation on site
Volunteers will stay in a dormitory with rooms shared with other volunteers. Living conditions will be Vietnamese standard with separate bathroom, single bed with mattress.
Food will be provided at accommodation. Meals will be mostly local food, which vary from the daily cooking schedule.
During working days, volunteers may either have lunch outside or eat with the staff at Hope Centre. They have to inform the cook at the centre one day in advance if they want to eat there. Volunteres can also come back to eat at the volunteer house.
⚠️ Requirements
Volunteers should pay a program fee of 400USD for the first 2 weeks and 100USD for each week after. This is to cover airport pick-up, orientation, food and accommodation, transportation to work as well as regular support from VPV team.