Hands Together

Service-volunteer opportunities with Hands Together fall into several categories:

• St. Francis  DeSales Volunteers (SFSV's)- This is our formal, long-term (longer than 6 months)  volunteer community that lives at our HQ in Port-au-Prince or Gonaives. Members live together in community and assist our Haitian staff as mentors and resource people. The focus of this community is a blend of service and spirituality. The SVS community combines daily devotion and prayer with with practical work to help improve our projects and our staff. We draw from the rich well of Catholic/Christian spirituality and embrace a simple lifestyle in solidarity with the suffering of the very poor.
• Hands Together Helpers - This program welcomes short term (1-3 months)  visitors who come to help with a fixed, specific project or need.  Hands Together arranges for lodging and food and in-country transportation. Participants are encouraged and welcome to follow the daily schedule of our volunteer center. HT Helpers possess certain skills needed at specific time. Example: Engineers coming to help us install an irrigation system at our agriculture project in Gonaives, or a computer networking expert spending 10 days setting up our computer lab at our high school in Cite Soleil.
• Visitors - Special guests, invited by Hands Together, for visits to our various projects.
• Delegations - Formal group visits of 3-12 persons, from parishes or schools –usually, these projects last 7-10 days.

Our Needs and Limitations

The focus of Hands Together is outreach to the poorest of the poor in Haiti. Most of our projects, by design and in keeping with our effort to foster greater independence, are staffed and run by Haitians themselves, and therefore, our need of volunteers is limited to people who can help with special problem situations and/or provide a special skill not readily available in Haiti. Our long-term St. Francis DeSales volunteers -SFSV - focus on working alongside our Haitain staff, acting as guides, mentors and partners. We are not designed to easily host people, and there are many groups/guest houses operating in Haiti whose mission is that very thing. Rather, our primary mission is first and foremost to our various outreach programs and we must limit volunteer acitivyt to those individuals who can direclty particpate in this mission. Furthermore, the environment in Haiti is extremely volatile and often unsafe which makes it very hard to create reliable volunteer positions.

Click on the tabs above for more specific info on our service categories

Click Here to: Download our SFSV Volunteer application