Empowering Volunteers for Education (Project EVE)

Our Vision:

"Empowered education by empowered communities."

Our Mission:

By engaging, training, and mobilizing community volunteers, our organization moves towards:  

1. Improving the ability of the community to effectively support the learning process;
2. Implementing educational activities addressing the current learning needs of children (such as basic literacy and socio-emotional skills); and,
3. Inspiring collective action among community stakeholders, leaders, and partners.

Our Core Values:

• Hopeful Perception. We see and understand learning with empathy, making it more meaningful with a sense of possibility.
• Positive Influence. We spread positive change to the learners and the community, creating a more enjoyable learning experience for everybody.
• Shared Responsibility. We form equitable and collaborative partnerships, inspiring collective action to advocate for education.
• Passion for Service. We focus on bridging what is needed and what we can do, serving purposeful work for both the self and society.
• Leading with Respect. We pursue to be leaders who listen and learn from others, nurturing spaces for growth, diversity, and inclusivity.
• Anchored on Integrity. We act honestly and consistently, being true to the moment of choice.

Our Team Lead will be our Executive Director. The Executive Director (ED) leads the overall direction of the organization and oversees the attainment of the organization's goals and objectives. The ED mainly manages the Development Team and mentors the Local Core Team. The ED's responsibilities are to find ways to ensure Project EVE continues to thrive and grow (organizational sustainability), to support the personal and professional development of volunteer leaders (leadership development), and to work with community partners in innovating ideas and crafting solutions for educational challenges (program development).

Our staff, which are all part-time and/or volunteers, work on a flexible schedule. Our Team Lead is currently a full-time employee of another educational not-for-profit organization that also follows flexible working hours, allowing our Team Lead to allot time for the LEAP Project sprint. Supporting team members are also working on a flexible working set-up or are graduating students who have time to allot for the organization.

A community-building program aiming to address student learning gaps by engaging, training, and mobilizing community volunteers in supporting educational projects.

Our solution seeks to solve challenges on poor literacy skills of grade school students in our local community, specifically on English reading comprehension and vocabulary of Grade 4-6 students. Before the pandemic happened, the Philippines scored the lowest in Reading on the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The country also performed poorly in Math and Science, which are domains that require good comprehension skills for someone to succeed at. These PISA results already alarmed the entire Philippine education landscape. However, different views have surfaced as to why it occurred. Being a systemic issue, several solutions at different levels have been suggested and implemented by both the government and local organizations. Among the large-scale solutions involved improving teacher quality, streamlining the national curriculum, and enhancing learning resources at schools.

This challenge was amplified further by the school closures and learning adjustments during the pandemic. Now that schools are transitioning back to face-to-face classes, institutions see the steep increase of grade school students having literacy skills much lower than expected. Interventions have been deployed here and there in different schools and different localities. However, teachers and schools can only do so much since they are looking at students in need with different grade levels and varying baseline skills.

Project EVE seeks to augment these efforts by addressing needs of Grade 4-6 students who have poor comprehension skills which are urgently needed before they get promoted to high school level.

Our solution is to create a “volunteer-led, community-supported” reading intervention program. Given the challenge of schools in reaching every student, we thought of maximizing community assets and mobilizing local volunteer efforts to help struggling learners improve their reading skills (reading comprehension and vocabulary).

We want to develop an 8-10 week reading intervention program that can be facilitated by volunteers within the premises of the community. The program will make use of reading worksheets with increasing levels of difficulty. It includes reading passages, vocabulary drills, and comprehension tests. Volunteers will undergo orientation and skills training for them to be capable of conducting the reading sessions. The volunteers, in partnership with teacher consultants, are then assigned 1 to 3 students each to whom they will implement and monitor the intervention. Since the approach is highly contextualized and each volunteer is focused on a few students, volunteers have the opportunity to vary their instruction and learning activities depending on their students' individual contexts. The program is flexible according to the learning variability of each batch of participants.

More than helping the students develop their reading skills and motivation to learn, the solution also sees that each volunteer will be able to influence other people at the community level towards having a positive influence towards learning, causing a “ripple effect” of collective action.

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To date, our organization has only conducted foundational research to demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution. The project was initially started to make use of actual school action research conducted by the teachers of Victorias Elementary School. They were looking for an opportunity to extend their research outside the school and scale it up for gathering more data and reaching more students who can benefit from it. All developments right after the adoption of the research are based on literature reviews, desktop research, and consultations with literacy teachers.

Some key points we learned from our research:

1. Comprehension skills are more likely to develop when students have the opportunity to understand the text in engaging ways, to construct their own meaning, and to respond accordingly.

2. Students need guidance from their teacher, parent, or learning facilitator to effectively understand unfamiliar text and comprehend meaning. The manner of questioning and the manner how students interact with the text greatly affects how they can process the meaning of what they read.

3. Translating foreign words into local language often helps build vocabulary better. Consequently, attaching local ideas or context familiar to the student would help them comprehend faster (ex. Comparing local and foreign names for animals, assigning local counterparts of job roles in the community around the student etc.)

All of these key points informed us how contextualization not only in teaching but also in learning support could improve the learning process of the students. It directed us to design an individualized and flexible program.

As a newly established volunteer organization, we want to build credibility and strengthen our capacity to demonstrate that our programs and efforts contribute positively to the lives of the learners we want to serve. As an organization, we believe in the power of meaningful success founded on evidence and facts rather than “baseless pure goodwill”. By showing evidence, we can ensure that (1) our efforts did create an impact on the community, (2) we can learn and improve on our future implementations, and ultimately, (3) gain trust not only from our funders but also from our stakeholders - the learners and the community.

Now is the right time to engage in a LEAP Project because we will not be able to do this without partnering with field experts and academics who can guide us through this unknown territory. We only know so much and having thought partners could push our boundaries further.

1. How can we effectively design a reading intervention program that can be facilitated by volunteers with varying engagement terms (from 1-month engagement to 3-month engagement)?

2. What indicators or factors volunteers should consider in contextualizing comprehension-building activities from the intervention program?

3. What are possible implications of increasing our volunteer-student ratio from 1:1-3 (small group sessions) to 1:10-15 (medium group sessions)?

Literature Review or Implementation Study on our Approach:

• We would like to know if our approach for reading intervention is effective or if we should consider another approach especially when designing for a volunteer-led program.

1. Pre-Post Research with adaptable monitoring and evaluation plan:

• Although we are able to conduct a pre-post data gathering and analysis before, we want to validate results from another party. This could also help us in setting-up future M&E plans.

Upon receiving the outputs, we plan to operationalize it either on a scale-up project or on an expansion project in another community. We hope to improve our program design and monitoring systems so that we could effectively serve our stakeholders. We also plan to share all the learnings we can gain with other members of the organization and the local community. Hopefully, these could also be inputs to contribute to our partnerships with the local government and local civic organizations.

Short-term Outcomes:

1. Improved reading comprehension and vocabulary skills of our student participants.

2. Improved capacity and competency of volunteers to facilitate reading intervention programs.

Long-term Outcomes:

1. Enhanced program design, monitoring systems, and volunteer management plans.

2. Strengthened partnerships with local government, civic organizations, and external sponsors/funders.

3. Established measurement mechanisms for building evidence of program success