Fundacion Mahatma Gandhi

Community Research

The Mahatma Gandhi Foundation seeks volunteers and/or interns for its Advance
Community Research, aimed at providing our community with baseline research in
targeted areas that are important for the history and the evolution of our
community. The program could benefit from empirical and non-empirical methods,
with special interest in creating an oral history of the community seconded by basic
statistical data not currently available.

At the present time there's nothing on the community, so interns/volunteers would
work on creating a body of knowledge, a toolbox of resources and would write
results for academic and non-academic settings. The writing may take place in
either Spanish or English, but translations into French, Italian or German would be
very useful as those are the larger communities represented in Las Terrenas.

The volunteer service or internship at this point would start with the basic steps in
research design. Simple research would be preferable (to be conducted within a
3-month time frame), particularly when using surveys or conducting empirical
methods or survey instruments. The Oral History Project of Las Terrenas may take
longer, but this initiative aims at contacting, recording, transcribing and publishing
the oral history of the place from a variety of sources, particularly at a point in time
when many of the "old folks" are getting really old.

The value of this initiative is inmensurable, so interns would enjoy living in such a
beautiful community as Las Terrenas is, but would be making a meaningful
contribution to the present and future of the community.

Our first community research volunteers were Rachel Anderson and Dr. José
Rivero. See more here and the published report here.