For Returned Peace Corps Volunteers

What is Help-from-Home?

Since 2015, SolarSPELL has worked alongside Peace Corps posts and volunteers in 8 countries across the Pacific Islands and East Africa. Starting in May 2020, we are launching the Help-From-Home initiative to build upon our history of collaboration and expand SolarSPELL’s footprint in additional Peace Corps countries around the world.

With a computer and connectivity, as a Returned Peace Corps volunteer, you can contribute to creating and developing educational resources that will amplify impact in Peace Corps sites and communities. 

To both improve existing SolarSPELL library versions and get a jump-start on creating new ones, Returned Peace Corps volunteers can Help-From-Home by: 

1. Creating local lesson plans 
2. Identifying local educational resources 
3. Translating early reader books into a local language 
4. Curating and creating new content

How to get involved

There are three ways to get involved:

1. Volunteer your time and expertise on your own schedule. Sign up here.  
2. Apply to be a content curation intern from June 1 – August 21 
3. Take an online graduate course in July 2020, Innovation in Action, with an RPCV professor. This course offers hands on experience building and curating content for SolarSPELL, a digital library that is being implemented around the world, providing access to information for resource-constrained communities that lack internet access. There will be a theoretical and conceptual underpinning as well that connects access to information to education, socioeconomic development, and to the Sustainable Development Goals. With some reading material and written assignments, most of the course will focus on localized, culturally relevant content creation and class discussions.