About VSA

VSA (Volunteer Service Abroad) is a home-grown Kiwi volunteering organisation and has placed more than 3,500 skilled New Zealanders on volunteer assignments overseas since 1962.

• We are New Zealand’s largest and most experienced overseas volunteer-sending agency.
• We work with people in Melanesia, Polynesia, Asia and Africa adding the skills and energy of New Zealanders to strengthen communities striving for change.
• We are an independent charity and are non-governmental, non-religious and non-political.
• Our volunteers have been in demand for almost 50 years, adding their skills and energy to help strengthen communities striving for change.
• We recruit ordinary New Zealanders to achieve exceptional work with our partner organisations.
• We have about 100 volunteers in the field in 12 countries at any one time.
• We send people not money, but we need money to send people.
• Every dollar of your money donated delivers VSA programmes and volunteers in the field.

All our volunteers work with partner organisations in one of four key priority areas:

• economic development
• social development
• education
• health. 

We believe we can make a positive difference in the world when volunteers, partner organisations and communities work together, sharing skills and knowledge. This approach, based on appropriate sustainable development, leads to improved quality of life, and helps build self-determining communities and stable nations.

We are currently working in Papua New Guinea (including the Autonomous Region of Bougainville), the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu in Melanesia; in Kiribati, Samoa, Tokelau, and Tonga in Polynesia; in Cambodia and Timor-Leste in Asia; and in South Africa, Tanzania and Zambia in Africa.

Special thanks to our partner the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade who provides significant support through the New Zealand Aid Programme for VSA volunteers working in development capacity roles overseas.