Hi everyone,

Today we are seeing more volunteers venturing out of Singapore doing various form of overseas community service project with the intention of wanting to make a difference in another's life. For organisations involved in International Volunteerism (IV) projects to sustain its effort for a long haul, it depends not only on the mere size of its volunteer pool, but also how volunteers are developed. Different organisations have different means to develop their volunteers based on the organisations beliefs, values and purpose, reflecting the diverse ways they generate their activities.

As every organisation has our own strengths, there is much to learn from one another and even more to share, as each other's efforts are synergistically leveraged upon. While there is no common model of volunteering that works for every organisation, there are however common trends that various organisations can come together to strengthen.

Amongst IV practitioners, there are huge amounts of resources, information and experiences that are worth archiving for sharing and serving as reference for future development. International Volunteerism Association (IVA) targets to get all practitioners to share these valuables resources and be the central repository for all IV practitioners as a continual process of knowledge management.

IVA is in a process of embarking on a research project to understand Singapore's IV sector better. This is the first phase of our study to collate essential data for us to identify and study useful trends. Pls click (or cut and paste): http://www.surveygizmo.com/s/59511/iv-in-sgp

This survey is important to IVA's effort to understand the sector better. This is crucial in building the IV's sector future. It will only take 7 minutes of your time. We hope to receive as many responses as possible by 31 August 2008. Pls help us to forward to as many organisations as possible who are engaged in IV in Singapore. We hope to cover as many organisations and as many sectors as possible, i.e. educational institutes, faith-based organisations, non profit organisations, for profit organisations, companies etc.

I look forward to your support to develop inspired and committed IV practitioners with IVA. Thank you.

Your Sincerely,
Dr Chan Yew Wing
Chairman
International Volunteerism Association