Global Village
🌍 2026 Kenya Trip Recap: Read reflections from our March 2026 journey to Kenya.
building beyond borders
Help build strength, stability, self-reliance, and shelter.
Our Global Village program is an immersive, international, short-term volunteer initiative that allows you to travel and build or improve safe, affordable housing alongside local communities worldwide. Spend a week working directly with partner families, building meaningful connections, and gaining an insider look at the housing challenges families are facing.
Origins + History
Since 1989, Global Village volunteer trips have brought life-altering momentum to international home building. Over the program's first two decades alone, more than 60,000 volunteers traveled with over 5,000 teams to build strength, stability, and self-reliance alongside future homeowners. The financial donations and physical labor generated by these traveling teams have directly helped build or improve more than 10,000 homes, impacting families in nearly 60 countries and providing them with a decent, affordable place to call home. The program continues to grow as a leading voice for shelter, currently coordinating approximately 466 teams and engaging more than 6,000 volunteers annually.
Our Goal for Every Trip
Every milestone achieved on a global build site feeds directly into a larger vision. Our Global Village teams dramatically expand access to decent and affordable places to call home by focusing on five core pillars:
- Lending a Helping Hand: Partnering directly with local communities to alleviate critical housing needs through active physical building, rehabilitation, and repairs.
- Mobilizing Critical Resources: Generating crucial funding streams to sustain local operations; for instance, U.S. teams have generated millions of dollars annually to accelerate structural builds.
- Preserving Local Wisdom: Learning, respecting, and utilizing indigenous building practices honed over generations to naturally optimize a home’s durability and environmental performance.
- Fostering True Ownership: Cultivating accountability by building with families rather than for them, working on equal footing while future homeowners complete their sweat equity.
- Creating Lifelong Advocates: Empowering team members to return home as vocal, fully activated champions for just and fair housing policies across the globe.
Join the team & make a difference
Our volunteer roster for the upcoming season is closing fast,
and our partner organizations are finalizing logistics as we speak.
