Construction & Community Worker

The program

This essential construction program was created to help impoverished families into safe and sanitary homes. Housing is a fundamental human right under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and everyone should have a safe, secure, and habitable home. Unfortunately, in Costa Rica, many people are impoverished and do not have adequate housing. Volunteers on this program work with project staff and locals on every aspect of the building process, helping wherever it is needed.  Volunteers play a huge labor role, ensuring that there is enough people power to ensure the building work can be completed. Without unpaid volunteers in Costa Rica, providing these homes to marginalised families would be out of reach. 

Goals of this Project:

• Provide low-cost, quality housing to impoverished families 
• Provide safe, healthy homes to enable families to live happier, healthier lives
• Improve the prospects of some of Costa Rica’s most impoverished people, and help them to break the poverty cycle
• Expose volunteers and locals to new cultures

How you can help

This construction program is vital to the lives of many Costa Rican families. Supplying a warm, dry and healthy home gives impoverished families a chance to grow and thrive. Volunteers play an essential role in the ongoing viability of this program, supplying a willing workforce to help the benefiting family into a real home. Participants may be involved in every aspect of the building process on this amazing program, from the design phase to final construction and furniture making. Volunteers will gain wonderful experience with the construction process and with working in a foreign environment. This program will undoubtedly be hard work. Volunteers must be fit and able to work manually, and more importantly – be enthusiastic with a ‘can do’ attitude. The weather may be hot, and volunteers will need to be able to work in the sun. This program plays a major role in providing communities with safe housing, while also providing an amazing cross-cultural experience for everyone involved.

Volunteers will contribute in many ways and can expect to undertake the following tasks:

• Help design work plans
• Help build the foundations for houses
• Move earth to flatten out ground
• Paint
• Build houses
• Move construction materials
• Help build furniture and fixtures for houses

A volunteer’s work day on this project will generally last between 4 and 6 hours and while we ask all volunteers to be flexible in this regard, a typical daily schedule is likely to go something like this:

7:00am Breakfast with hosts

8:00am Bus/walk to project site

8:15am Pre-start meeting with project supervisor

8:30am VOLUNTEERING DUTIES START

A tea break and lunch break will be fitted in during the day, but often the timing of breaks will change based on the needs of the local staff and number of volunteers on hand.

4:00pm VOLUNTEERING DUTIES END

4:30pm Bus/walk back to host family home

Evenings Free time to simply relax, hang out with your hosts, have dinner together, then relax some more!