Leaning Exciting from Community Project

Leaning Exciting from Community Project

Community Development (CD) is one the main subjects in Wide Horizons School.  Before 2009, WH students did not have a chance to implement project in migrant communities.

They just had a chance to practice just how to write proposal in class as a theory. Fortunately, since 2009, WH students have an opportunity to practice in communities such as collecting information. Moreover, after they wrote proposal, they have a chance to send proposal to donor, Room to Grow to be able to implement projects. (Room to Grow is a donor who donates to WH students in order to implement their projects)

In 2015-2016 academic year, students have a chance to learn about Community Development project cycle. After we learned project cycle, we visited 4 migrant schools in Mae Sot area to research about their background and current problems. Those schools were Hsa Mu Htaw, SAW Safe House, New Wave and Elpis Schools. In addition, they also presented about their schools’ history and problems. After that, we came back to school and we divided 4 groups for the projects. There were 6 members in each group and they chose schools by raffle system. We did a lot of practices by studying in classroom and outside of school. For examples, before we went to collect information in communities, we practiced to gather WH community’s information. Then, we went and gathered information in our project schools by many different ways such as interview, observation, questionnaire, reading and small group discussion in that school. When we reached WH school, we collected and tabulated the information that we got from our project schools.

After that, we decided the priority problem for our project in communities. The different schools have different problems regarding their situation such as insufficient bath room and lack of activities and lack of play game materials. In this month, we are learning how to write a good proposal. Currently, we have written our project’s problem statement, organization background, community background, identify goal and objective and action plan. We are still writing about beneficiaries, budget plan and community participation. Moreover, we are still learning about sustainability (future plan).

 This is extremely difficult for us to do project with different communities because this is the first time for us. However, every student have some of experiences regarding community. Furthermore, we are really enthusiastic to help the community’s problems. Even if we face the problems, we are trying to do the project with the community without disappointing them.  As a result, we got a lot of experiences from the community, which are helpful for us to improve our skills as communication skills, project management skills and proposal writhing skills.

Written by Jalorn & John Soe