Philosophy

We created Community Friends to form lasting and meaningful relationships and create transformative programs with deep impact. However, we didn’t start by dreaming up interventions and policy goals. Instead, we provided simple assistance to the community’s most vulnerable. We provided free meals to the children at school. Then, after developing trust with community members we approached the community itself and sought their guidance.

Today, we continue to work from the bottom up in collaboration with the communities we serve. We believe bigger is not necessarily better and we prefer to operate our programs on a smaller, more direct, human scale to ensure meaningful relationships and minimize unintended consequences. Personal, long term, highly familiar, bottom up: this describes our philosophy.

We constantly see lives changed through our work; the lives of villagers as well as the volunteers who help. Our work focuses on the human experience of helping each other.