Earthquake Awareness Campaign

-The story of change makers

In our society, we know there are bunch of people who make commitments, promises to change the society, but a very few of them actually do it with hands on activities. This story is entirely about those change makers who indulged themselves in mobilizing the surrounding, the story of House of Volunteers!

The Beginning of the journey:

The concept of House of Volunteers, Bangladesh   Foundation (HoV,BD) was originated by a group of Bangladeshi Students and Professionals who were studying in MIT/ working in Boston, USA back in 2007. The organization came into being in the same year to carry out voluntary activities as envisioned by its founding members. HoV provides students the opportunity to engage in activities in the "real world" which make a real difference. In partnership with young professionals as well as graduates from educational institutions, the organization promises to engage university students with its voluntary activities to promote social welfare and support moral cause. HoV has its chapters in different universities of Bangladesh (e.g. BUET, BRAC University, Dhaka University,AUST etc.) The current president of HoV, BD is Ahsanullah Khan Faisal.

Aims & objectives of HoV:

The key driving force of HoV, or I may say the core spirit of HoV is Volunteerism. The aims and objectives of the House of Volunteers include: To create a platform for the students and young professionals to be involved in devising innovative solutions for developing nations like Bangladesh, particularly in the education sector, utilizing information and communication technology (ICT) To organize team(s) to design and implement education related projects, either locality or internationally To harness and utilize local resources to the maximum extent possible, to build local capacity and ensure sustainability Advocate for education solutions that are modern and of international standard Involve high-impact but low-cost solutions.
Currently HoV runs four programs- Computer for Bangladesh. (Project name- OSCEP, Open Source Computer Education Program), iSchool (Interactive School, Books for Bangladesh (Book Drive) and Earthquake Awareness Campaign.

Why focusing on Earthquake?

Bangladesh is located on an earthquake disaster zone of the world. Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, being an earthquake prone densely populated area, has very high earthquake risk in terms of losses of both lives and property. Moreover, in the old Dhaka area, where the old buildings can collapse at a medium level of seismic tremor, the risk of a massive-scale damage of property and lives is obvious. Besides, there are many schools in old Dhaka where young children attend. This particular section of the society is very vulnerable to an earthquake attack because they are not fully aware of earthquake, its potential damages, and the precautionary actions that need to be taken to minimize subsequent losses.

Under such backdrop, this EMK Center funded project titled ?Earthquake Awareness Program for School Going Children? has been initiated by ?House of Volunteers Foundation? under its ?Earthquake Awareness Program (EAP)? program. Old Dhaka has been considered as the implementing area to mitigate the risk and help in saving lives of people who are underprivileged and are not at all aware of possible dangers.

Hands on Activity:

As I said earlier, we see many projects, initiatives are nipped in the bud because they lack the interest and encourage. But HoV is different from the others. There is a number of workshops which is held in different venues, like EMK Center, Dhaka University Campus, BRACU Campus, EWU Campus to train up the volunteers. Only in the year, 2013, HoV trained up more than 147 volunteers to be the change makers.  HoV has reached around 5000 students and 100 teachers to make them environmentally literate with the Earthquake Awareness Campaign. The campaigns are mainly held in the schools, and the schools are selected in the basis on some special criteria like: Number of students of the school, Location of the schools preference given on densely populated area, Earthquake vulnerability of the proximate locality, due support of the school authority etc. The main approach to lead the program is multimedia projection, students? participation, question answer session etc.

In the end I would like to conclude with best wishes to House of Volunteer and respect to their volunteer spirit. It?s an honor to be a part of this tremendous and generous family.