As part of the Salesforce 1:1:1 model of donating 1% of our time (in volunteer hours), 1% of our revenue and 1% of our profit to not-for-profits, Salesforce gives all employees 56 hours to volunteer a year.
A team of Salesforce employees from Sydney, Amsterdam and New York are all coming together to build a house for a week in Cambodia for a family in need. We will be spending a week in Cambodia building a house with our bare hands - some of us learning how to use tools for the first time!
We are building a house through the Volunteer Building Cambodia association, here is their story:
"Volunteer Building Cambodia is a locally run, community-driven NGO (non-government organisation), focussed on helping poor Cambodian families improve their living conditions.
Founded by local Khmer man, Sinn Meang in 2014, Volunteer Building Cambodia provides poor families in rural Siem Reap with housing, wells, water pumps and toilet facilities.
VBC builds solid houses for extremely poor families who lack the resources to build their own liveable homes. We do thorough assessments to ensure those most in need receive our houses.
About 80 per cent of Cambodians live in rural areas where a staggering 85 per cent of people do not have access to adequate sanitation and 35 per cent cannot afford to access safe water. Where possible we provide wells and toilets to improve living conditions.
Many families in rural Siem Reap still live on less than $1 a day.
We are looking at ways to break the poverty cycle and help these families to become self-sufficient and able to provide for themselves."
Thank you all for your incredible support, and to the volunteers who travelled to Cambodia to change a family's life. Mr. Sinn and his team are improving the life of Cambodians one house at a time, but we also had the opportunity to learn more about the extended community impact VBC have made. We visited the community centre where children are eager to go to after school in order to learn English, and we found out that the whole property was fully run off of solar panels. The community centre is run by local Cambodians who have also had their lives touched by the VBC, sending some of them off to college as the first family member to attend tertiary education. The experience in Cambodia was much more than building a house, it touched all of our hearts and impacted our lives in an intangible way and we are all so grateful for the support from our family and friends to help make this a reality. We would encourage everyone to have this amazing experience because we came back with a better appreciation for the opportunities we have in our own lives as well as better understanding the current day situation for Cambodians. I know we all have similar stories, but the Cambodian people were some of the friendliest that we've encountered. I met a driver at the hotel after my first day onsite, coming home covered in dirt and doing the first manual labour I've ever done. Feeling pretty proud, I was talking to the driver about the house we were building, and I quickly understood that the driver was living in a smaller place with his three daughters and pregnant wife. He was working two jobs to put his daughters through school, to which I understood easily because in Sydney, a lot of my colleagues have told me how expensive school can be, especially uniforms! But when I asked about the girls, he said that they each had one uniform, had to hand wash it each day and go back in the humid heat each day in the same clothes, but they could only afford one uniform per girl. I asked how much each uniform was (thinking in Sydney, they're hundreds of dollars), and he said they were each $10. The priority that the Cambodian people put on education is both inspiring and humbling. We have the world at our fingertips and can learn anything we want online. Stories like our driver at the hotel remind us to appreciate each day and the opportunities we have. Thank you all for helping us build a new home for a family and hopefully see you all in Cambodia next time!