Creating a culture that meets our physical, psychological, and spiritual needs.
Our Work:
Re-Imagining Service Trips.
We specialize in crafting relevant service trips for academic cohorts, church missions, and other socially minded citizens. Our aim is to provide transformative experiences for participants through cultural exchange and community-building projects. Our programming is driven by listening to the communities we serve with and responding to their needs.
Pollinating Deep Ecology.
We partner with schools across Virginia to create pollinator gardens on their grounds, offering a means to promote ecological awareness and understanding. We work together with service organizations and invite volunteers to join us on garden installation and maintenance projects. Educators play a vital role in this initiative, developing a range of ecologically-focused lesson plans and training teachers to incorporate garden-based curricula for elementary, middle, and high school students across various subjects.
Connecting Arts, Culture, and Education.
We partner with The Association of Highland Women (AMA) and the International Maya League to promote creative and critical thinking skills through a curriculum that respects local culture and history. MAP designs programming around four teaching objectives: Environmental Stewardship, Gender Equity, Civic Participation and Cultural Pride. MAP provides an ambulatory arts education program, teacher training workshops, infrastructure improvements, curriculum enhancement, and community organizing to encourage creativity, adaptability, and the ability to seek alternatives and exercise agency in personal and civic life.
Santa Catarina WASH Campaign:
Building Sanitation Infrastructure
Because of mudslide displacement, the communities we work with are living in areas with limited infrastructure and sanitation measures in place. The community must harvest rainwater to be able to wash their dishes and clothing, which requires traveling up and down a hill many times per day. We install communal sinks in these communities, improving the health outcomes for those effected.
Epidemiological research demonstrates that the two leading causes of mortality in our partner communities in Guatemala are upper respiratory infections and waterborne contaminants. For children under five, respiratory illness is the leading cause of death. This is linked to the practice of cooking on open pit fires in tiny, unventilated homes.
Stoves built by HSP service-learning partners channel the thick smoke from cooking fires out of the unventilated brick dwellings via a new chimney installed with each stove. The size of the stove is large enough that its stovetop can fit many items at once, making it ideal to be able to provide for large rural families and warm their space.
Clean Air Stove Building
Promoting Indigenous Merchants.
In partnership with our sister non-profit in Guatemala, AMA, we give indigenous producers tools to develop their brand, packaging, and access to digital markets for migrant consumers in a supportive market. We plan an investment portfolio to sell women's development bonds and seed a capital market, encouraging formalization and promoting productive savings. This program directly impacts 125 Entrepreneurs, including adult women and young people, and indirectly benefits 563 relatives.
Follow our Instagram:
