Mission
Each year, Cuso International sends hundreds of volunteers to work on collaborative development projects in more than 40 countries in Africa, Asia, the Pacific, Latin America, and the Caribbean.
Cuso International (formerly CUSO-VSO) was created in 2008 from the merger of two development agencies: CUSO was founded in 1961, originally as Canadian University Service Overseas. Voluntary Service Overseas Canada started in 1995. Combined, they placed some 15,000 volunteers in Africa, Asia, the Pacific, the Americas, the Caribbean and Eastern Europe.
Cuso International is the North American strategic alliance partner of VSO, a worldwide federation of voluntary service overseas organizations based in the UK, the Netherlands, Kenya and the Philippines. Volunteers are also recruited from the United States (through Cuso), India (IVO), Ireland (VSO Ireland), Uganda (VSO Jitolee) and Australia (AVI), and from several developing countries with VSO programs. Approximately one-quarter of Cuso & VSO volunteers are from the developing world.
These VSO agencies make up the world's largest non-governmental development network that works through volunteers. Collectively, the members of VSO International have placed over 45,000 volunteers since 1958.
Cuso International volunteers come from many professional and personal backgrounds, from many ages, and from across Canada and the United States as well as from many of the Southern countries in which they work.
Through its own programs and as a strategic partner of VSO, Cuso works with developing world organizations and governments to identify areas of greatest need. Volunteers work with overseas partner groups on locally and nationally managed projects. This way, the benefits of their work continue to be felt by local people long after the volunteers have passed on their skills and returned home.
Read more about this topic: Cuso International
Famous quotes containing the word mission:
“Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story—a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“... [a] girl one day flared out and told the principal “the only mission opening before a girl in his school was to marry one of those candidates [for the ministry].” He said he didn’t know but it was. And when at last that same girl announced her desire and intention to go to college it was received with about the same incredulity and dismay as if a brass button on one of those candidate’s coats had propounded a new method for squaring the circle or trisecting the arc.”
—Anna Julia Cooper (1859–1964)
“Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)