Youth Star recruits Cambodian university graduates for 12-18 months service in under-served rural communities. We train, coach and supervise volunteers during their year of service. The volunteers live and work in the communities and are accountable to them. The volunteers come together quarterly for reflection and further training.

We encourage poor, under-served rural communities to apply for volunteers and together we develop the volunteer’s job description. The communities provide housing to the volunteers and identify an active and respected member of the community to be the volunteer’s “Mentor” and partner.

Our volunteers work in 4 sectors:

• Education and Youth Development,
• Health Education,
• Rural Livelihoods/ Income Generation, and
• Good Governance.

All volunteers spend at least 60% of their time teaching, coaching, and mentoring students at risk of dropping out of school or students who have already dropped out. The rest of the time the volunteers work on the other 3 sectors.

In the first month of service our volunteers conduct a community mapping activity to identify the most vulnerable children in the community, and to assess community resources. In consultation with local education officials they then organize informal classes and tutoring for the vulnerable children.

Our Youth Star volunteers are trained in the following areas:

• Educational awareness, including increasing school registrations and literacy.
• Health and hygiene.
• Child Protection policy.
• Sexual rights (a recent survey in our communities indicated that about 40 of young people are sexually active).
• Reproductive health.
• HIV Aids prevention.
• Safe migration.
• Prevention of drug and substance abuse.
• Promoting non-violence.
• Environmental protection

The Youth Star volunteers are catalysts in the communities in which they work and are important role models for the children. Youth Star Cambodia is a youth service organization whose mission is to build a just and peaceful nation through citizen service, civic leadership, and social entrepreneurship. Our organizational objectives are to build a culture of good citizenship through volunteerism, to give children an opportunity to lead healthy and productive lives, free from the threat of violence, and to fill critical human resource gaps in under-served rural communities.