Our mission is to provide love and care to children deprived of parental care and to change the lives of the volunteers who love and care for them.
0.0 Introduction
This handbook is for use by OSSO staff and leadership to properly execute the OSSO volunteer program.
0.1 Terminology
0.1.3 Operations Coordinator
Local, long-term orphanage liaison and volunteer program lead. DOVEs report to the Operations Coordinator for their site.
0.1.0 DOVE
Director of Volunteer Experience. There is one DOVE couple per site. All DOVE expenses related to program work are covered by OSSO. These include: travel to and from their site, housing, food, service shift transport, grocery shopping transport, excursion costs, and other program-related expenses.
DOVEs are responsible for covering their own hygiene-related expenses, souvenir, independent travel expenses, and other personal expenses.
0.1.2 Assistant DOVE
Assistant DOVEs serve as additional support to the site’s DOVEs, strengthening leadership capacity and helping maintain program consistency. Each site may have one Assistant DOVE, selected in advance by the OSSO office.
0.1.3 SERVE Specialist
SERVE Specialists are long-term local staff who model and support activity-based engagement with the children, helping volunteers strengthen their interactions during service shifts. This is a site-specific role and may not exist at every location.
0.1.4 ST
Short-Term Volunteer. Individual volunteers who serve for 1-11 weeks.
0.1.5 SA
Semester Abroad Volunteer. Individual volunteers who serve for the full semester, i.e., 12 weeks.
0.1.6 Family
Family volunteers. A group of related volunteers. Typically serve 1-4 weeks, with some exceptions.
0.2 Proposing Changes
Occasionally staff will have changes or updates they would like to propose. These changes should be proposed via written communication to the relevant parties and should not be implemented without authorization.