Volunteer Spotlight: Alvaro Perez

In July 2009 The Great Generation took a group of nine students from ESCP Europe Business School to Uganda for two weeks on a capacity building project. Alvaro Perez, one of the volunteers, talks about his experience and why he found it so rewarding.

I got to know The Great Generation towards the end of 2008 when they came to our London campus to talk about their upcoming volunteering projects. To bring this exciting opportunity to life, they gave feedback on the successful collaboration project which our students delivered in Kampala the previous summer. Many students attended their presentation and I walked away with a sense of how fundraising and volunteering is a unique opportunity to get involved with an international partnership abroad, which was something I had been thinking about for some years.

I can honestly say that my decision to participate on this project was one of the best I’ve made! I enjoyed every single minute that I committed to fundraising and planning for the project. I cannot think about any other time in my life where I have gotten so much in such a short amount of time. We had the opportunity to develop and share some of the business skills that we had learnt at ESCP. We did this through teaching, brainstorming and preparing documentation for the expert partner in Uganda to help them leverage their skills and grow as an organisation. We also had the opportunity to get to know them more deeply and learn from their stories of success. It was an all-around overwhelming experience, one worth repeating.

I would like to steal some space here to give a special mention to the management we received from the The Great Generation team: Rose Latham, Erin Beer, Amy Daw and especially Emily Jundi who followed us to Uganda and kept everything under control. We felt safe and we had a continuous reference point to ask questions and share worries, and a brilliant project manager who was always willing to give advice and propose ideas over the different parts of the project we were involved in. Their support definitely had an amazing impact on making the experience so successful. Thank you.

More than half a year has now passed and I am still in touch with both the The Great Generation and the expert partner in Kampala. In fact, this afternoon whilst I was in the office, I received a call from one of the guys in Uganda. I truly hope that I will have the chance to collaborate in future projects with The Great Generation and the expert partner in Uganda. 


What more can I say? I really would say more, but I don’t have any more space left! I encourage everyone reading this to take that final step and commit to that project that they have been thinking about & deeply wishing to undertake. Really. Do it!