Become a part of the largest entirely student-run environmental international development project in the world!

Established at the University of Southern California campus in 2003, USC Volunteer Latin America has taken over 200 individuals abroad for volunteer work, donated $28,000 to Costa Rican NGOs, provided school supplies to over 400 rural school children in Costa Rica, and completed over 5,000 person-hours of community service.

Join our 2010 Spring break program to restore, preserve, and educate in one of the most biologically diverse areas of the world. In the past we have offered trips to Costa Rica and Nicaragua. This year's spring break service-learning trip will take place in Londres, Costa Rica.

USC Volunteer Latin America was created for one purpose - to change the world for the better. After 4 years of volunteer expeditions, that mission is being fully realized. In addition to the services provided by the volunteer groups, the hallmark of the program has been to make a large donation to local Costa Rican NGOs to help facilitate invaluable work in the areas we visit. We are currently the largest donor of ASCOMOTI (ascomoti.org), an organization which was created to save the critically endangered mono titi, a subspecies of squirrel monkey of which only 1500 remain in the entire world.

Volunteers have tracked monkeys through the jungle using GPS units to map the travel patterns of troops, painted schools, built nature trails, built a basketball court, planted trees in the rainforest, and worked to restore the land on a recent addition to Manuel Antonio, Costa Rica's most famous national park.

Our partnerships include: Eco Era, ASCOMOTI, Miraflor, and The Fund for Costa Rica. Government partnerships include MINAE - the Ministry of Environment of Costa Rica, and the Ministry of Education of Costa Rica. These partnerships have allowed us to see and do things that no other visitor to Costa Rica ever gets the chance to do.

Our donations have been used to fund the salaries of guards for a private rainforest preserve, create an environmental education program, and build tree nurseries that have been the source of tens of thousands of trees which were planted in the Rio Naranjo Biological Corridor.