HealthCare Volunteer, a 501 (c ) (3) nonprofit, announced on September 23, 2006 that it has launched its first successful pilot volunteering program in a small village outside of Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe.

Neilesh Patel and Laura Sacolick, two volunteers with HealthCare Volunteer, conducted an oral hygiene education program and food donations program to children in a small village about 15 km away from the town of Victoria Falls.

The small team delivered food donations to over a dozen people and oral hygiene / dental decay prevention were discussed with the children as well. Earlier this year, the organization announced the opening of its Africa office in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania.

Food donations were made possible by Neilesh Patel and Laura Sacolick, who both donated the foodstuff. As part of the program, HealthCare Volunteer was investigating a method to deliver $1 of every dollar donated to its healthcare volunteering programs.

Many other non-profit organizations deliver only a fraction of donations to the actual people who may need it, because of high overhead and administrative costs with making donations. We have devised a method by which we can deliver donations directly to the area of need without those administrative costs.

"I'm pleased that we were able to find a repeatable way for 100% of donations to our organization to be used for the good of needy people", said Neilesh Patel.

HealthCare Volunteer recently announced the launch of 4 new volunteering programs around the world. The organization announced the launch of medical/dental/public health volunteering programs in Tanzania, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Nepal and The Gambia.

Recently, volunteers have been applying to the four programs to be launched in February, 2007 and plans are in the works to deploy its first group volunteers to Tanzania as early as January, 2007.

HealthCare Volunteer has plans to deploy volunteering opportunities on 6 of the 7 continents by the end of 2007. HealthCare Volunteer is in the works of setting up official government relationships with the Ministry of Health these countries so that volunteers will work with government clinics and provide the much needed healthcare manpower in these African nations.

HealthCare Volunteer, a 501 (c) (3) non-profit organization, was started in January 1, 2006 by an American dental and medical student, who realized the need for a free non-profit portal that connects all volunteers interested in health care to volunteering opportunities. It is currently the largest listing of health-related volunteering opportunities. Due to resource constraints, several national health care organizations rightfully chose not to undertake such a drastic project, and so the opportunity to unite health care volunteers globally remained. It was clear that an independent, 3rd party, non-partisan, non-governmental organization (NGO) unaffiliated with any country or entity needed to be formed to promote health care volunteering in a rapidly globalizing world.

http://www.healthcarevolunteer.com