A group of 56 volunteers, including five Aggies, will stay in Costa Rica for six weeks to help a community increase educational and environmental knowledge by creating programs, beginning on June 25.

Through the Junior Master Gardener Program and the AgriLife Extension Program, the Aggies have partnered up with Amigos de las Americas, AMIGOS, a nonprofit organization that helps young adults cultivate leadership and multicultural awareness through community service in the
Latin Americas.

“We’re going to do developmental projects,” said Travis Helm, senior agriculture and leadership development major. “I took a horticulture class, and we partnered up with AMIGOS to help initialize agricultural programs.”

Founded in 1965, AMIGOS has grown from a Houston youth group to having 28 chapters and more than 20,000 volunteers around the U.S. “Ultimately what we are looking for is to create a better global understanding of where people are coming from, especially in the U.S.,” said Kristen Kaper, vice president of programs for AMIGOS. “We have so many immigrants coming in from Latin America. We want to have a better understanding of where people are coming from in a cultural context and that is important in business, medicine, in law, no matter what you do. We also want to encourage leadership skills because they apply across the board in anything you do in life.”

Predominantly working with education, the program creates activities that increase community involvement. This specific group will be focusing on agricultural and economic awareness and will create community-based initiatives that will facilitate positive change in host communities.

“Volunteers will work with the youth in the communities to help them come up with a community-based initiative. It is a process that looks at what the communities are interested in building or training people in locally and then applying for funding from Amigos and from other organizations in those communities that they will be able to complete themselves,” Kaper said.

Being able to work closely with the Junior Master Gardeners has allowed more resources to become available to the AMIGOS program.

“We have been looking for strategic partnerships like this, and it is so exciting to work with both the professors and students,” Kaper said. “The students have already had a whole course on this, so they are walking into this experience with a semester’s worth of training. They can add so much value to our program. So I’m excited to see what kind of ideas they come up with and to see the creativity involved.”

Before going to Costa Rica, the students will have to go through both online and offsite training in Miami before departing for Costa Rica. Volunteers will partner up with Earth University in Limón and will stay with host families to practice their Spanish-speaking abilities as well as become exposed to Costa Rican culture.

“Volunteers will spend the first three days at Earth University in our training program, learning more about how the university works and also about how AMIGOS works on the ground,” Kaper said. “They will receive direct guidance on how to function and how to work within the context of our projects. We usually have two to three volunteers in approximately 26 communities throughout the Costa Rican area that we are working in. The volunteers will spend about two to three hours a day working with children and holding workshops. It is kind of like summer camp, and they will be focused around agriculture and nutrition in their summer programs.”

After completing the program many of the AMIGOS volunteers will be qualified to apply to be project and leadership staff.

“In our model, we focus on leadership by youth and young adults specifically,” said Erin Hein, class of 2007 and manager of marketing and communications for AMIGOS. “It provides this opportunity for people as young as 16 years old, and I think we are one of the only programs that will give the environment to someone that young where they can thrive and have just as much responsibility as older volunteers.”

Upon returning to the U.S., many volunteers said they come away from the experience with a different global outlook.

“Participating in AMIGOS as a volunteer was a life-altering experience,” said Carmen Sullivan, sophomore general studies major. “It exposed me to so many people who have greatly influenced where I see myself in the future and the career choices I hope to make.”