Colin Salisbury

Colin Salisbury, a New Zealander born 30 September 1970, is a social entrepreneur. He is the Founder and President of Global Volunteer Network (GVN), a volunteer service organisation.^[1]

Bill Gates has mentioned Global Volunteer Network as one possible starting point for young people who want to make a difference in the world.^[2]

In 2009, GVN celebrated its 10,000th volunteer, providing volunteer service opportunities in community projects throughout the world with 29 projects in 21 countries. Through their GVN Foundation they are well on the way to raising a million dollars for communities in need.^{[citation needed]}

Wanting to connect and share his knowledge and experience with others, Salisbury recently launched the ‘Be the Change Program', a course he leads aimed at developing the next generation of social entrepreneurs.

Early life

Salisbury was born in Lower Hutt, New Zealand and was educated at Hutt Valley High School. He left school in 1986 at the end of sixth form with only three school certificate subjects and a leaving certificate that said, “Colin Salisbury is best suited to practical subjects.” Salisbury enrolled in an electronic technician’s course and spent the next three years installing alarms. In 1988 at the age of 18, Salisbury had the opportunity to go to Papua New Guinea on a six week trip volunteering with the Christian Radio Missionary Fellowship, a trip which was to change the course of his life.

Arriving in a small jungle village, Salisbury was struck by the bloated bellies and rust colored hair of the children. He recalls wandering down to Lake Kutubu and throwing stones into the water feeling a deep yearning to help the villagers and to make a difference,to leave his mark. Wondering what one person could do, he threw a stone into the lake and watched the ripples moving out. He thought that if he could inspire others, it would be like the stone’s ripple, one small ripple, leading to a bigger one and a bigger one, a ripple of change.

After being back home a short time, Salisbury had an opportunity to go to the Philippines to work with families living in a slum. It was here that he was challenged by how happy many of the people were and was surprised at their contentment and sense of community. Salisbury quickly learnt that happiness is not about being poor or rich; it’s about a state of mind.

It was at this point that Salisbury decided he needed to go to university and study. Whilst his teachers had thought he was better suited to practical work he believed he could do more with himself. So in 1994 he undertook a Bachelor of Arts in social policy and then stayed on to do his masters in International Development. He wanted to have a real involvement in working with communities in developing countries.

His thesis took him to the Konkomba tribe, north of Ghana where he was to review adult literacy programmes that were running there at the time. Arriving at the village he was summoned to meet the chief who told him the following story.^[3]

“A farmer sows seeds to germinate and grow and yield and harvest. But if you sow seeds like corn and you place a stone on top of the seed, it will grow around and around and finally die. But if somebody moved that stone away it would germinate and produce a good harvest.³

Salisbury recalls the chief saying to him, “you coming here is helping us remove the stones.”

Global Volunteer Network

Salisbury never forgot that story and says he has repeated it often because it describes Global Volunteer Network’s partnership philosophy with communities.

Salisbury spent the next two months living in a mud hut observing three different literacy programmes for his thesis. However, what struck him the most in Ghana was the schooling. A class of 100 children would have one teacher. It was clear that many children were missing out on an education due to the shortage of teachers. It was at this point that his thinking around GVN was born. He knew that in the long term trained teachers were needed but could see that in the short term, if volunteers could be provided for the schools, many more children would be able to access education.

Back in New Zealand Salisbury worked as a community development advisor with Internal Affairs and for a couple of years put his ideas on the back burner. He spent a lot of time learning how to use the internet but by the end of 2001 Salisbury had started to formulate the idea of a volunteer organisation. He wanted to give people the opportunity to experience life in another community, share their story and gain as much from their experiences as he had, and he wanted it to be affordable.

Christmas 2001 saw Salisbury launch the Global Volunteer Network website and he found three programmes on the internet in Ghana, Nepal and Ecuador that he wanted to send volunteers to. Applications flooded in and in their first year, 2002, GVN placed 240 volunteers.

Wanting to learn what makes a good project, how to provide for volunteers effectively and give them enough work in order for them to have a meaningful experience; Salisbury took his family to Romania for three months at the end of 2002.

Salisbury and his wife worked with an American couple, Bruce and Sandy Turner, who had been given permission to take children out of the Spitals (government run orphanages) to set up five group homes. Salisbury’s wife, who is a teacher, worked with the volunteers and the children in the morning while Salisbury worked on establishing an organisational structure and looked after their two children. In the afternoons they went back to their apartment in the Galati district and ran GVN from the laptop.

GVN grew very quickly which allowed new projects to open up, all of which they wanted to visit before placing volunteers, ensuring their suitability.

GVN Foundation

In 2004, after visiting a village in Uganda decimated by AIDS and seeing a real need to educate the children, Salisbury had a desire to assist their partners with funding for capital projects and programmes. The idea of setting up a foundation that could raise money was born.

Flying home from Uganda Colin saw an advert to climb Mt Kilimanjaro and raise money to save the Rhino. He thought, “We could do that, but we could build a school in Uganda instead." Back home he found a trekking company that would lead the trek, launched it on their web site and had 20 people sign up. Each participant raised US$2000 for the project, so with a combined total of US$40,000 they had enough for a new school. A year after conceiving the idea, the school was built.

Salisbury co-founded the GVN Foundation in 2005 with Courtney Montague after witnessing the impact that resources combined with volunteering could make in a community. The vision of the GVN Foundation is to support the charitable and educational work of local community organizations in various countries through the distribution of financial, in-kind and material donations.

The success of the first trek to Mt Kilimanjaro prompted Salisbury to organise another fundraising trek. This time they took a group of forty trekkers to base camp on Mount Everest to raise funds for a Nepalese orphanage. A trek to Machu Picchu in Peru soon followed. These socially conscious fundraising treks are now part of GVN’s major fundraising activities.

In 2007 Colin set up the Stop Child Poverty website, an advocacy campaign developed in support of the United Nations Millennium goals to help end child poverty. Salisbury was invited to attend the UN half time Millennium conference in Geneva and during that trip met Bill Clinton. The GVN Foundation is now officially recognized by the United Nations and has been granted Special Consultative Status (2009) with the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC).

Eat So They Can

In 2007 Salisbury co-founded the international fundraising campaign ‘Eat So They Can’. A campaign that invites citizens of the world to take part in what is collectively one huge dinner party in an effort to help stop child poverty.

Salisbury often refers to Eat So They Can as ‘the global dinner party with a cause’. The Eat So They Can campaign takes place annually over a weekend in October in support of the United Nation’s 'World Poverty Day'. All funds raised at the events go towards supporting orphanages and schools in Africa and South America, providing disadvantaged children with the essentials for survival.

Eat So They Can has become another major fundraising activity that the GVN Foundation undertakes on an annual basis.

Be The Change

Salisbury says his journey has just begun. As a naive 18 year old he believed he could make a difference, one ripple at a time, and he has. Now through his visionary ‘Be The Change program', Salisbury is assisting many others worldwide to follow the words often incorrectly attributed to Mahatma Gandhi's - “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”^[4]

Many people have a dream or an idea to start a project or a charity but don’t know where or how to begin. Salisbury’s desire to share with people what he has learnt along the way resulted in the ‘Be the Change’ programme. This is a program designed to teach the skills and share the know-how, to make the dream a reality. The week long program, led by Salisbury, takes participants through a series of workshops that focus on identifying and developing the skills required to make their ideas or dreams a reality.

External links

• http://www.volunteer.org.nz Global Volunteer Network
• http://www.gvnfoundation.org/ GVN Foundation
• http://www.volunteer.org.nz/about/colin.php Bio on Global Volunteer Network
• http://www.etchmagazine.co.nz/eco-lifestyle/becoming-an-‘agent-of-change’

References

1. ^ Avison, S. (2009). "Colin Salisbury’s story". http://changents.com/change-agents/colin-salisbury/story. 
2. ^ "Bill Gates interview with Newsweek". http://www.newsweek.com/id/42654. 
3. ^ Salisbury, C. (1997). REFLECT (Regenerated Freirean Literacy through Empowering Community Techniques): The Way of the Future? A case study of three adult literacy programmes in the Saboba/Chereponi district in Northern Ghana. (Masters thesis). Victoria University. 
4. ^ Morton, Brian (August 29, 2011). "Falser Words Were Never Spoken". NY Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/opinion/falser-words-were-never-spoken.html. 

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Name	Salisbury
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Date of birth	1970
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