A 6 month placement working with Shelter Centre assisting on one of a number of projects.

Due to the current funding situation this placement has been withdrawn. Please apply for another placement.

What work will I be doing?

Volunteers are likely to be working on one of the 5 different projects detailed below, but this is subject to change depending on what is required at the time.

1. Transitional Settlement and Reconstruction after Natural Disasters (United Nations 2008)
   Shelter Centre is revising this publication, in collaboration with the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, for publication in 2010. These guidelines aim to provide humanitarian shelter practitioners with accurate and comprehensive consensus guidance and best practice on how to plan and implement an effective and appropriate shelter programme.
2. Transitional Shelter Standards and Prototypes
   This initiative, consisting of several projects in parallel, aims to agree upon common standards and indicators for family shelters in humanitarian operations, and to work with manufacturers to develop a collection of stockpilable family transitional shelter prototypes, thereby improving the quality and consistency of response. These projects are funded by DFID with support from UN bodies, the Red Cross/Red Crescent Movement, and International NGOs.
3. Transitional Shelter Guidelines
   Shelter Centre is drafting and editing the a brief practical toolkit on developing and implementing an effective transitional shelter programme, and incorporating comments from the project consortium including donors, UN bodies, and major NGOs.
4. Camp Planning Guidelines
   Funded by DFID and IFRC, Shelter Centre is redrafting and editing the latest draft to provide guidance for both specialists and non-specialists, as well as local governmental bodies concerned with the planning and upgrading of refugee and IDP camps. 5. Shelter Centre website
5. Shelter Centre Website
   This “Web 2.0” community website is undergoing continuing development to support humanitarian shelter specialists. Features include the Shelter Library, a resource of over 600 publications supporting the shelter sector, and an interactive community of shelter specialists who can contact and share documents with each other and collaborate on consensus shelter sector projects.

What skills or experience do I need?

Required:

• Strong visual communication, writing and editing skills
• Proven ability to work flexibly in a small team
• Computer literacy

Desired:

• Final year students, graduates or professionals, who are interested in a career in humanitarian work
• A strong interest in communicating with the user, and refining text, icons and diagrams is desired for the guidelines projects
• Experience with Adobe InDesign

Want more info?

Visit www.sheltercentre.org.