2012 Communitas Award Winner

Quota International’s We Share Foundation
Location: Washington D.C.
Business Type: Nonprofit Community Service Organization
Nomination Title: Hand-in-Hand World Service Program
Category:  Organization’s Specific Program

Quota International’s Hand-In-Hand World Service Program Changing Lives Together in Developing Countries

Quota’s Hand-in-Hand World Service program serves people in dire need in developing countries. It connects 6,000 Quotarians around the world who care with Quotarians in 19 Quota clubs in India, Fiji, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Suriname who have designed unique service projects to meet the needs of their local communities. Quota members are all volunteers who enjoy working together to make an impact in their community and their world.

700 on-site volunteers in these impoverished and underserved areas, provide for such basic necessities as food, shelter and healthcare, as well as job training, preschool education, daycare, and resources for special needs children and adults. Their projects are funded by donations from Quota clubs and members worldwide. Quota International’s charitable arm, the We Share Foundation, ensures that every penny donated reaches its intended developing country project, by underwriting the administrative costs of the program.

Not only does the Hand-In Hand program provide direct assistance to individuals in our world who most need help, it allows members in America and worldwide, to be more aware of the issues and problems in developing countries and gives them a vehicle for doing something to help.  An example of just one of the 19 world service projects is the DLF city, India, Quota club’s Charitable Dispensary and Vocational Training Centre. In the slum areas of DLF City, a family’s average monthly income is less than $50. Most families include three or four children; their parents are unskilled laborers at construction sites. Housed in shanties that provide little shelter from rain, cold, and heat, most are undernourished and inadequately clothed. As a result, many experience health problems and have come to one of Quota International of DLF City’s two medical dispensaries for treatment. With the support of Quota members worldwide, in recent years DLF City Quotarians have been able to provide free medicine, physical exams, immunizations, and dental and eye camps; they also created a vocational training center to teach women skills to make a living including sewing, embroidery, typing and computer skills. This year volunteers are developing an education center to help increase the literacy level of the community’s children, working to prepare the children for a life beyond menial labor and break the cycle of poverty.

Quota clubs raise money in their own communities and donate it both locally and to world service. Since the Hand-In-Hand World Service program’s inception in 1983, Quota clubs have given more than a million dollars to Quota projects in developing countries. In that time the signature world service project, the Quota Home for Abandoned and Destitute Women in New Delhi, has grown from just a dream of New Delhi Quotarians and a small shelter for women and children with nowhere to turn, to an enormous facility that is so much more than a shelter. Today it includes a vocational and literacy program for women, a day care program, a full primary school, a home for elderly women, a medical clinic, a diagnostic center, and, now, a vision center to diagnose eye problems, provide eye glasses, surgery, and post-operative care for people in need. This year Quota’s volunteers at the Quota Home are helping with a basic element of woman’s dignity and health—the need for sanitary napkins. Quotarian donations are used by the women at the Quota Home to hand-make these necessities in bulk and distribute them to poverty-stricken women who otherwise could not afford them.

To read about all of Quota’s Hand-in-Hand World Service projects go to http://www.quota.org/we-share-foundation/club-to-club-world-service/

Quota International is a 93-year old international service association launched in Buffalo, New York. Today Quota’s 6,000 person membership has expanded to 12 countries worldwide (Aruba, Australia, Canada, Curacao, Fiji, India, Malaysia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Philippines, Suriname, and the U.S.). As a worldwide organization, Quota International has two areas of concern that comprise most of the focus of our members’ service efforts: Speech and Hearing and Disadvantaged Women and Children. Members join Quota clubs in their communities to serve their country and community, develop good fellowship and friendship, and advance the ideals of righteousness, justice, international understanding, and good will.