Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Volunteering catches up in Vizag, youths are into social activities as it adds to their resume

By SNV Sudhir

Visakhapatnam, Dec 30, 2013: Volunteering and campaigning for social causes is catching up among Vizag youth. They are making beelines to offices of NGOs and voluntary organizations offering their Good Samaritan hand, all for a participation certificate.

Youth feel that a participation certificate will be an ‘add on’ to their Curriculum Vitae or resume and that it would land them in a plum job. With more youth coming forward offering help, some voluntary organaisations in the city are clearly under pressure to organize more service oriented programmes every month.

Ken Foundation Society, which has been into conducting beach clean up drives, heritage sites restoration, teaching classes to poor children and other programmes has recently introduced 120 hr volunteer internship programme.

“The response has been very good. Earlier we used to find it very difficult to find people for the voluntary programmes but now the scene has changed. They are coming forward asking us to conduct programmes regularly. Normally, students spend 2 hours in a week to participate in voluntary programmes. We issue participant certificates to them which they add it to their accomplishments and resumes,” said Santosh P of Ken foundation.

 The Foundation collects one time fee of Rs 100 as registration amount to enroll for the volunteer internship programme.

“When competing with freshers, there would be a significant 30 to 40 percent advantage that those who do a social internship would hold, as they would come across as being more committed and inspired,” said, Kiran Dasari, Vizag head of Adecco, a Swiss multinational human resource consulting company.

Some students are also taking up the voluntary activity as a recreation besides building up their resumes.


“Its fun to be part of such voluntary programmes and the satisfaction we get is immense. The certificates issued by the NGOs helped some of my seniors to get a job,” said Ram Vikas of MVGR engineering college.

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