Day: October 26, 2011

  • Volunteer: Internship Opportunities

    Volunteer: Internship Opportunities

    Paola Schifino

    If you want to provide community service and even better can get credit or fulfill a requirement, ACORN International would love to be the place for you! Here are a couple of programs that are breaking ground with us already – get in touch right away if you’d like to add your school to the list.

    George Brown College – Toronto: “George Brown College- School of Social and Community Services- Students seeking a Diploma in the Social or Community Services fields are able to take advantage of placement opportunities with ACORN International. Students will help with research, outreach and various other aspects of campaigns that ACORN is supporting.”

    York University – School of Social Work – Toronto York has approved ACORN International as a placement location for students seeking either a Bachelor in Social Work (BSW) or a Masters in Social Work (MSW) beginning the 2011-2012 school years. Students would help on outreach, communication, and research working with various immigrant communities in Toronto on the Remittance Justice Campaign.

    Georgia State University School of Social Work – Atlanta A similar set of placements is being organized in a partnership between GSU in Atlanta and ACORN International on communities in Georgia.

    Tufts University – EPIIC Program — Boston Beginning in 2008 we inaugurated a partnership offering opportunities for internships through the program with ACORN International as part of the global studies program at Tufts. One student spent the summer working as an organizer and research with ACORN India in Mumbai.

  • Volunteer: Home-Based Research Assistance

    It’s a big world, and when ACORN International is trying to tackle huge institutions like the banks and money transfer organizations, we need a lot of people plowing through a lot of documents, state and provincial rules in various countries, facts and figures, and processing the information country by country, including in places where we do not organize like the United Kingdom, Europe, and China. A good example of added talent in doing the great Remittance Justice Campaign reports was the labor of volunteer, Larry Ginsberg from Baltimore who waited through the state insurance and banking records vainly looking for signs of regulations in 32 of the United States. Jim Lynch working from a home computer in Little Rock managed to connect us to important information from bankers in Africa that filled in key gaps in our research.

  • Volunteer: Club ACORN

    Club de ACORN in Buenos Aires In 2005 energetic ACORN Argentina community organizers working in La Boca and Barrellas teamed with a number of young expats from the USA, UK, and Australia visiting Buenos Aires to create an after school enrichment program for ACORN members’ children. Monthly fundraisers organized through Facebook were used to purchase supplies and other tools for Club de ACORN. The program has now been reorganized in La Matanza, the mega-slum in the provincial outside of the city. Similar programs have been organized in other ACORN International cities in Latin America especially.

  • Volunteer: Making Summer Special

    Melanie Craxton of the University of Edinburgh (Scotland) and Rochester, New York, does not believe in letting a moment go to waste, so she wanted to make her summer count for something. She had spent time as an intern with the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh in the past, and could see from the Remittance Justice Campaign that there were similarities as well as an interest by ACORN International in tackling the complexities of microfinance for our membership, evaluating the field, and even building tools to allow our members in the slums to be better “loan consumers.” In an exciting development to both Melanie and ACORN International, we are exchanging three months of a hot and humid New Orleans summer in 2011 for her skills and help in producing our research on microfinance which we will roll out in the fall of this year.

  • Volunteer: A Sabbatical in India

    Brad Rockwell is a seasoned environmental lawyer based in Austin, Texas. His firm has a sabbatical program. We were delighted when he approached ACORN International about spending two months with us in what turned out to be a great experience for him and for ACORN India in early 2011 when he spend the time in Delhi helping on everything from the India FDI Watch Campaign to the ITO communities dislocation which our Commonwealth Games Campaign had not been able to stop.