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Student Editorial Contest Winner

High on Helping: The Dangers of Voluntourism

We are honoring the Top 11 winners of our Student Editorial Contest by publishing their essays. This one is by Ketong Li, age 17.

By The Learning Network

This essay, by Ketong Li , age 17, from Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Conn., is one of the Top 11 winners of The Learning Network’s Ninth Annual Student Editorial Contest , for which we received 16,664 entries.

We are publishing the work of all the winners and runners-up over the next week, and you can find them here as they post.

As an Asian student in the United States, I’ve faced my share of cringe-inducing cultural insensitivity and casual imperialism. But in the summer of 2020, ironically, I was guilty of the exact same.

A group of peers and I had traveled to Myanmar, ostensibly to create a musical to promote and preserve the Wa people’s artistic culture. The fact that none of us had any background in anthropology, musicology or production was strangely irrelevant. “Hi! I’m here to protect your heritage by publicizing your customs to the world,” I announced shamelessly to the Wa chief.

Welcome to the rapidly growing industry of voluntourism, which markets itself as a seamless blend of charity and leisure. Organizing trips for over 10 million people annually, voluntourism agencies reap billions from their clients’ good intentions. The seemingly benevolent nature of the activity has made it a top choice extracurricular for students who can afford it.

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Michigan Journal of Economics

The Paradox of Voluntourism: How International Volunteering Impacts Host Communities

Written by Virginia Baumgarten

Every year, over 10 million international travelers, typically from North America and Europe, travel abroad to volunteer in impoverished communities (The Guardian, 2021). Students, youth groups, and other well-intended participants construct buildings, assist at orphanages, and pursue other short-term development projects in an effort to give back. Yet, to what extent do these volunteers actually benefit host communities, economically and socially?

This phenomenon is known as “voluntourism”, a combination of the words “volunteer” and “tourism”. As a $2 billion industry, voluntourism is one of the fastest growing trends in travel (Driving Change, 2021). Volunteer agencies advertise these short-term mission trips as an opportunity for participants to broaden their worldview and put their altruistic desires into action. While these trips may provide participants with life changing experiences, the opposite is often observed in the communities impacted. Rather, voluntourism is imperialistic in nature. This practice economically disenfranchises local communities, creates relationships dependent on aid reliance, inefficiently manages resources and perpetuates harmful stereotypes.

The imperialistic nature of voluntourism is apparent in the exploitation of the communities they aim to help. While volunteers often have good intentions, the voluntourism industry sustains practices that hinder local economies rather than stimulating them. When organizations hire local workers to complete development projects, they pay for labor and the profit margin is smaller. However, when agencies recruit volunteers who are willing to pay to complete these same jobs, they profit off the impoverished state of local communities by attracting volunteers. This not only deprives local workers of job opportunities, but builds economic dependence on aid, disempowering vulnerable economies.

 Even skilled volunteers, such as medical students, can cause disruption. Newsweek Columnist Maya Wesby describes a situation in Ghana where locals became dependent on the medication and medical services provided by volunteers. This free care caused them to opt out of medical insurance, hurting local healthcare and insurance providers, and increasing the locals’ dependence on foreigners (Newsweek, 2015). Because these trips are designed for the short-term, participants don’t recognize the harm they are imposing on communities over time.

Additionally, in terms of economically benefiting host communities, voluntourism is incredibly inefficient in its management of expenses paid by participants. While volunteer agencies often advertise a desperate need for volunteers, costs for these programs are far from cheap, ranging between a couple hundred to a couple thousand dollars, depending on the program’s duration. However, while participants are committing a large sum of money towards these altruistic efforts, only about 18% of funds raised are allocated to the recipient community, with the other 82% is put towards travel expenses (Anderson, 28-37). While this provides minimal benefit for the host community, it provides larger benefit for both the participant and voluntourism industry. Of course, it’s important to consider how participants would have managed these trip expenses if they did not travel abroad, as their money may not have been committed towards charitable efforts. Additionally, personally experiencing the impoverished conditions of these communities may encourage participants to donate more money. However, if donating a small fraction of money is contingent on spending thousands of dollars elsewhere, this further highlights the real motivation behind the organization of these trips: self-fulfillment. 

Socially, voluntourism programs provide both participants and local community members with a stereotyped, flawed sense of reality. The design of these programs perpetuates white saviorism, the problematic idea that minority communities must depend on white individuals to be “rescued” or “saved”. Because international volunteers typically go abroad for a week or two, they often pursue low-skilled tasks, such as basic construction, distributing food, tutoring children, etc. Therefore, the ability for volunteers to make a valuable difference, such as by helping alleviate poverty or dismantling the systems that maintain poverty, is limited. However, when unskilled white volunteers travel abroad to perform basic tasks, this promotes the toxic belief that locals can’t complete basic tasks themselves. Not only do locals develop a false sense of inferiority, but the volunteers develop a false sense of superiority, believing that locals are helpless without their assistance. Without recognizing that these programs have little humanitarian purpose, and are largely designed to benefit them, participants develop a flawed, dangerous perception of the developing world. This perception reinforces the stereotypes that high-income nations hold against impoverished communities, causing them to spread these false beliefs outside of the host country.

It’s important to note that volunteers with genuine motivation to help aren’t entirely at fault for volunteering, as they are largely misled by the agencies who recruit them. However, by understanding the inefficient and manipulative nature of voluntourism, we can pursue more effective methods of empowering impoverished communities. The most effective method? Donation, by far. While less glamorous than volunteering abroad, directly assisting local communities financially, such as through providing microloans to individuals or funding local projects, can directly empower locals to pursue development projects without the assistance of unskilled international volunteers. Not only can this spur independent economic development and ensure efficient management of funds, it can also help reverse white-savior tropes promoted through voluntourism.

Bansal, S. (2021, November 29). Do No Harm: The Dark Side of Voluntourism. Driving Change. https://drivingchange.org/do-no-harm-the-dark-side-of-voluntourism/

G.S. (2021, June 17). Voluntourism: new book explores how volunteer trips harm rather than help. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/jun/10/voluntourism-new-book-explores-how-volunteer-trips-harm-rather-than-help

Wesby, M. (2016, April 14). The Exploitative Selfishness of Volunteering Abroad. Newsweek. https://www.newsweek.com/exploitative-selfishness-volunteering-abroad-363768

Anderson, Eric & Kim, Ricky & Larios, Kelly. (2019). Voluntourism: The Economic Benefit and Societal Costs of Short-Term Mission Trips. 28-37.

University of Notre Dame

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Put the Volunteer in Voluntourism

By Christian Cepeda

Published: July 31, 2020

“Our campus is in South Bend, Indiana; our classroom is the world.” -Notre Dame President Emeritus Edward A. Malloy, C.S.C.

The University of Notre Dame takes pride in the service students do internationally, but after attending a medical mission trip to Lima, Peru, I began to question how much volunteers were actually contributing to the local community. My experience led me to believe our work was not nearly as beneficial to those we were there to serve as I might have hoped. With this in mind, I sought to discover whether voluntourism—defined as “utilizing discretion and income to travel out of the sphere of regular activity to assist others in need.” (McGehee, N.G., and K. Andereck)—should continue at the University of Notre Dame. In this essay, I will share several people’s stances on voluntourism and discuss previous studies on the matter. I also will refer to an interview with Jimena Holguín, who shared a lot of my concerns and told me the role voluntourism has played specifically at Notre Dame. Lastly, I will share my experience of how I concluded that voluntourism clubs either need to be better prepared before departure or need to be removed entirely from the University.

After seeing volunteers degrade the local community at the mobile clinic in Lima, I wanted to see if people viewed voluntourism as negatively as I did. Ian Birrell, an award-winning columnist and foreign reporter, believes short-term volunteer projects cause more harm than good. First, local workers lose much-needed jobs to wealthy tourists who pay to volunteer. Second, it is not ethical to let abused or abandoned children get emotionally attached to tourists, only for them to leave the kids behind and increase their trauma. He points out that if the standards were reversed and foreigners came to care for America’s kids, we would not allow it (Birrell, 2010). Noelle Sullivan, an Assistant Professor at the Institution of Global Health Studies at Northwestern University, agrees with these remarks and adds her position that people who vouch for their own voluntourism experience overestimate how beneficial their contributions were. The problem is that it is hard to find the few good organizations among the bad ones. A solution to the voluntourist dilemma she offers is to stop trying to be a “white savior,” which is when a white person feels that they know what is best for another community without context. Often, the best way to help a community is not by using your working hands but by attempting to “amplify local efforts and voices in the long term” (Sullivan, 2018).

While there are several negatives associated with voluntourism, many of its harshest critics acknowledge it is a nuanced issue. Sullivan mentions that most people that go on these mission trips have good intentions and that, “Criticizing good intentions discourages people from trying to do good in the world” (Sullivan, 2018). Wyatt Foster, a Global Citizen Year participant in Senegal, is on the side of good intentions as she believes the benefits outweigh the costs. She argues this point by using what she terms “real good versus feel good”—“real good” is making a positive impact on a place, while the concept of “feel good” is going on a trip to boost one’s self-esteem. Foster believes these “goods” are not mutually exclusive (Foster, 2017). Living in Senegal, Foster saw that there is an impact in students seeing global issues first hand. With proper education and exposure, volunteer tourism can help individuals aspire to positions in international aid in the future.

Several research studies have shown that voluntourism does not truly benefit the communities it seeks to serve. Nancy McGehee and Kathleen Andereck interviewed locals from volunteering locations like West Virginia and Tijuana, Mexico, to see how this tourism directly impacts the community. One local said, “Volunteers have been coming to this part of the country for thirty years. I have been here for six, and while I am sure that the volunteers reap benefits from the experience, I honestly don’t see a change in the community” (McGehee and Andereck, 2008). A different study calls out volunteers as most of them only want to turn their vacation time into a charitable act. The trips are self-centered as tourists are often motivated almost equally by altruism and self-gratification (Guttentag, 2009).

Although media stories like to accentuate the positive results, many research studies portray more mixed results. Guttentag’s research wants to increase the attention of the adverse side effects instead of solely the positives. Benefits the media likes to depict are the work that volunteers achieve, the money generated from volunteers for these host communities, personal growth for the volunteers, and fostering a better understanding between diverse cultures. Several cons the study thoroughly addresses are neglect of local’s desires, disruption of local economies, and completion of unsatisfactory work (Guttentag, 2009). Kerrigan’s work, which used several interviews with locals, suggested that International Volunteering and Service (IVS) programs need to stop sending adolescent Americans to developing countries because it is creating adverse outcomes for the host community. These can be seen in the belief of negative stereotypes and in the creation of dependency culture—when people are encouraged to become dependant on the benefits given to them by others than to work for the benefits themselves. The same study, however, would advocate for voluntourism contingent on several adjustments being made. It strongly suggests that trips can be more beneficial if there were an increase in the pre-departure information given to volunteers and if volunteers give locals the same respect that they themselves would want (Kerrigan, 2012).

Most studies that address the pros and cons of voluntourism conclude that its benefit (or lack thereof) is specific to the situation. Judith Lasker’s book, called Hoping to Help: the Promises and Pitfalls of Global Health Volunteering, focused on medical brigades and mentioned that the host community welcomes some volunteers but not all of them—this all depends on the volunteer. Do the volunteers want to learn about the culture and help as much as they can, for as long as they can, or do they simply want to use the opportunity to explore? Bad volunteers waste time and are more of a burden in “trying to help” than not helping at all (Lasker, 2016). Another book, Stephen Wearing’s Volunteer Tourism: Experiences That Make a Difference, mentions that the amount of “participation” a volunteer intends to put out affects how much the community benefits (Wearing, 2001). While the work of voluntourists is often well-intentioned, it is often deleterious since many voluntourists are unaware of the power and privilege they hold in these positions. Another study also describes medical brigades as “black-market health care providers.” It claims this because the treatment is rushed, there are no proper records for patients, and medical professionals often feel obligated to prescribe medicine since their patients may never see a genuine doctor (Mclennan, 2014).

To see if previous studies are applicable to our community and to learn more about voluntourism at Notre Dame, I interviewed Jimena Holguín, the Assistant Director of the International Summer Service Learning Programs here at the Center for Social Concerns. I shared my experience in Peru with her, and I asked her to share some of her opinions on my discoveries in researching the topic. She believes that short-term mission trips, like the one I went on, tend not to be very beneficial; in general, she suggests that the longer one volunteers, the better as longer trips allowed volunteers to build meaningful relationships with community members. I went on to give examples of the medical voluntourism clubs here at Notre Dame, such as the Global Medical Brigades, which went to Panama for Spring Break. She explained that while larger groups make mission trips more fun, they often defeat the purpose of volunteering by making it seem like more of a vacation and less like an opportunity to work with and learn from the host community.

I intended to learn what Jimena Holguín thought were the problems with voluntourism. She said that the most significant issue involved ethics. She explained how, oftentimes, students will go on mission trips to perform medical procedures or teach classes that they would not otherwise be able to do in the United States without proper certification. She concurs with Birrell’s position on refusing to lower our standards for people outside of the United States because every person deserves the same dignity. Other issues include the negative psychological effects that groups of volunteers may have on the children that they leave behind after their trip is over. She told me about a time when she was in El Salvador, where she saw several little kids crying as they were saying goodbye to a group of missionaries that had spent a week in the community. As this group of voluntourists were leaving, and the children exclaimed, “It’s always the same! They come and leave.”

The most intriguing part of our discussion encompassed Foster’s idea of the “real good versus feel good.” Holguín said, “Mission trips are definitely a feel good experience. More often than not, a mission trip is going to be more beneficial for the volunteer than the local community.” I suggested that her answer meant mission trips are selfish, to which she agreed. Holguín mentioned that some students might go on this trip with the intention of improving their resumes or curriculum vitae (CVs). If this sort of service is self-serving, I asked, why is putting mission trips on a resume or CV beneficial? She replied: “Because service is valued… That doesn’t stop ever… Whatever you apply to, these [mission trips] are going to be valued.”

When I asked what the biggest problem with voluntourism is, Holguín pointed to ethics. However, she argues that when volunteers are prepared and have a genuine mindset of wanting to do good, then they can have a real impact on the community. Holguín says, “Mission trips are usually people’s first and only exposure to life outside of the United States.” Holguín, like Wyatt, believes that first-hand experience can help people improve their decision-making skills in the future and encourage them to take into consideration the needs of others and similar global issues. She said that many people who go on one-week mission trips are inspired to go on an International Summer Service Learning Program (ISSLP), an eight to ten-week service learning opportunity offered by the University of Notre Dame. There are other programs similar to ISSLPs at colleges around the United States, but what makes ISSLPs unique is that Notre Dame requires a lot of pre-departure preparation and education, which many short-term trips lack. She also believes that volunteer tourism can allow people to discover something about themselves that they had not known before. A student may go on a medical brigade and realize that he no longer wants to be a doctor. I shared my own story about how the person I went to Peru with discovered that she no longer wanted to become a pediatrician after working with children all day.

The interview ended with a discussion on a better alternative to voluntourism. Holguín believes the best way to help communities and avoid self-motivated action is to listen to communities, find out what they need, and act upon it. The optimal result occurs from providing the community with the funding or labor that they need to be able to eventually flourish on their own without the need for volunteers. I then asked why there seemed to be plenty of clubs at ND that focus on volunteering abroad but not any that focus on fundraising for international efforts. She said that the number of volunteering clubs does not matter when anyone that meets the requirements is able to start a club and directed my attention to a club that focused on fundraising named “Hesburgh Heroes.”

The club “Hesburgh Heroes” has an amazing backstory that would not have been possible without volunteering abroad. A man named David Gaus got an accounting degree from the University of Notre Dame but felt unfulfilled, so he spoke with Father Hesburgh regarding his aspirations and decided to volunteer abroad in Ecuador. His experience seeing people lacking basic health care inspired him to become a physician with the goal of serving the people of Ecuador. When he came back, he explained his ambition to Father Hesburgh, who then helped fund his education so that David could go back to Ecuador once he got his medical degree. Now, Dr. Gaus has two hospitals and several clinics throughout the country. The club “Hesburgh Heros” was created to directly help fund these hospitals and was named in honor of Father Hesburgh (Gaus). Had it not been for Dr. David Gaus volunteering abroad, many of the people of Ecuador may have never gotten the health care they needed!

Although this story suggests that voluntourism has its benefits at Notre Dame, it is disputable because, according to Holguín, my experience in Lima was quite common. Though I had heard a lot of negatives associated with mission trips, I had initial optimism for my trip to Lima. On the first day there, the volunteers were sent on a “reality tour” to see the more impoverished areas of Lima near the mountainside. As soon as we got to the designated location, volunteer after volunteer started pulling out their phones to record the poverty that surrounded them. The locals had built a plenitude of small homes on what appeared to be a barren desert. The streets were so steep that people occasionally fell, and the volunteers took pictures and videos of everything their eyes saw, including the locals. I found it disgusting and dehumanizing; these volunteers looked at the locals like zoo animals. The week, however, progressively got worse. We got warned not to take pictures because it was rude, but we were also specifically instructed not to take photos of the children without their parents' consent. This did not stop numerous people from taking pictures of children they found cute and thinking of captions for their Instagrams. I thought I was in a nightmare, and I was trying in every way to make up for the actions of the other volunteers. Unfortunately, their mistakes were too numerous to overcome.

After seeing the improper treatment of locals from volunteers in Lima, I had my doubts as to whether we were beneficial for the community. I was dismayed by volunteers’ disrespect for the locals and the total lack of effort to communicate with them. Now, I have realized the benefits of voluntourism depend solely on the mindset and preparedness of the volunteers. My opinion, influenced by previous studies and by my experience in Lima, is that these voluntourism trips overwhelmingly benefit the volunteer over the community in which the volunteers were supposed to support. Holguín suggests although longer trips are more beneficial, the best way to work with a community in need is by listening to them and trying to help provide them with the resources they need to become self-sustaining. For this reason, if the voluntourism clubs at the University of Notre Dame are not cut, they should be required to follow the model similar to ISSLP and more adequately prepare volunteers before departure. To conclude, I suggest that the University of Notre Dame listen to the demands of the communities and research the best solutions instead of assuming what these communities need and assuming that the best way to help these communities is to be there in person through voluntourism.

Works Cited

Birrell, Ian. “Before You Pay to Volunteer Abroad, Think of the Harm You Might Do.” The Guardian , Guardian News and Media, 14 Nov. 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2010/nov/14/orphans-cambodia-aids-holidays-madonna.

Foster, Wyatt. “Voluntourism – The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.” Global Citizen Year , 29 Dec. 2017, www.globalcitizenyear.org/updates/voluntourism-the-good-the-bad-and-the- ugly/.

Gaus, David. “Dr. David Gaus.” ANDEAN Health and Development , www.andeanhealth.org/about-us/dr-gaus/.

Guttentag, Daniel A. “The Possible Negative Impacts of Volunteer Tourism.” International Journal of Tourism Research , vol. 11, no. 6, 2009, pp. 537–551.

Holguín, Jimena. “On The Topic of Voluntourism Here at Notre Dame.” Personal Interview. 26 Apr. 2019.

Kerrigan, Katelyn. "An Exploration into the Perceived Effects of International Volunteering and Service on Host Communities in the Global South." 2012. University of San Francisco, Master’s Theses. 58. https://repository.usfca.edu/t...

Lasker, Judith. Hoping to Help: the Promises and Pitfalls of Global Health Volunteering . Ithaca: ILR Press, an Imprint of Cornell University Press, 2016, pp. 117-143.

McGehee, N.G., and K. Andereck. “'Pettin' the Critters': Exploring the Complex Relationship between Volunteers and the Voluntoured in McDowell County, West Virginia, USA, and Tijuana, Mexico.” In Journeys of Discovery in Volunteer Tourism: International Case Study Perspectives . Lyons, K.D., and Wearing, S. editors. CABI Publishing. 2008, pp. 12–24.

Mclennan, Sharon. "Medical Voluntourism in Honduras: ‘Helping’ the Poor?" Progress in Development Studies 14.2 (2014): 163-179.

Sullivan, Noelle. “When Volunteering Abroad Does More Harm Than Good.” HuffPost , HuffPost, 11 Feb. 2018, www.huffpost.com/entry/opinion-sullivan-volunteering-abr oad_n_5a7de894e4b044b3821d1627.

Wearing, Stephen. Volunteer Tourism: Experiences That Make a Difference . Wallingford, Oxon; New York: CABI, 2001, pp. 140–156.

Christian Cepeda

Christian Cepeda is a Neuroscience & Behavior and Spanish double major with a minor in Latino Studies. He is a National QuestBridge Scholar, a Balfour-Hesburgh Scholar, an MSPS Scholar, a National Hispanic Scholarship Fund Scholar, the recipient of the Inaugural Renaissance Student Award, and most recently a Harvard-Amgen Scholar. He is a proud Mexican-American from Jefferson City, Missouri. He plans on obtaining an MD-PhD because he believes that combining research with patient interaction improves not only the quality of patient care but also the quality of research. Christian was inspired to write "Put the Volunteer in Voluntourism" after witnessing the harsh reality of voluntourism first-hand. While one of the only Spanish-speaking volunteers in the Spanish-speaking country of Peru, he quickly learned that in giving to those in need, most volunteers  felt the necessity of “letting their right hand know what their left hand was doing.” With this essay, he hopes that the Notre Dame community can learn from his experience, and find a better alternative to voluntourism. He would like to thank Ian Gerdon for nominating his essay.

Home » Resources » Voluntourism and the Personal Statement

Voluntourism and the Personal Statement

• By Blair Munhofen
• February 11, 2019

The “voluntourism” essay is something of an inside joke to college admissions officials.

These essays follow a similar pattern:

• student travels to a developing country
• student volunteers for a short period of time
• student realizes that others lack the privileges and resources student has
• finally, student commits to making others’ lives better

This kind of essay may well be rooted in real and meaningful experience. However, the prevalence and superficiality of these essays tends to put off admissions officers. While a good essay serves to differentiate a student from other applicants, a voluntourism essay may have the opposite effect.

Wait, what?

For many high school students, the notion that an essay about volunteering could potentially harm their application seems to totally contradict the advice from both high schools and colleges, both of which encourage and sometimes even require students to volunteer to graduate or gain admission.

So what’s the issue with voluntourism?

Let’s start with what voluntourism actually is: typically, it’s when a person, in this case a high school student, travels somewhere for both sightseeing and volunteering. The nature and length of the volunteering portion of the trip can vary considerably. Some voluntourism trips involve a few hours of service whereas others may include days or even weeks of volunteering.

The point is that not all voluntourism programs are created equal; not all programs genuinely help those in need. Truth be told, some programs are more concerned about those serving than those being served.

Take, for instance, this New York Times article , which describes American tourists spending thousands of dollars to travel to Haiti and construct a building while Haitian masons watched. The amount of money spent by the amateur builders could have been used elsewhere, like classroom or medical supplies. Or the masons could have been paid to do the work for which they were trained. One might argue that those who traveled to Haiti may be more likely to give—and give generously—to future causes there after seeing some of the country’s challenges firsthand. But the benefits of voluntourism for the people it is intended to serve is debatable.

The point here is not that voluntourism is inherently misguided; we think that with thoughtful planning or reflection, it can serve as a meaningful experience for students. Like other forms of service, voluntourism can facilitate the development of self-awareness and empathy; in fact, those are the kinds of skills that colleges hope students can bring to their campuses!

So, maybe you are signed up for a voluntourism program for a forthcoming school break or summer. Or perhaps you’ve already had a voluntourism experience. How can you make sure you have a meaningful experience, or are able to reflect on the experience you’ve had in a meaningful way?

As with all extracurriculars, it’s important to bring an open mind to this activity. Noticing your feelings and reactions to what you encounter, particularly anything that challenges you, is a goldmine of insight. You can learn a ton about yourself and what gets you going—as well as what brings on the boredom or discomfort. If you’re going on a trip, take a journal or keep a blog: do something that requires you to reflect on your experience. If you’ve already gone on a service trip, spend a morning or afternoon recounting what you did and saw, and then spend even more time considering why you remember what you remember, and why that may be important to you.

Though you might hesitate to center your college essay on your voluntourism program, you shouldn’t discount the experience you had. With intentional reflection, you can render the experience meaningful to you as well as others.

Looking for more tips on the personal statement? Check out Signet’s Guide to the Essay.

Blair Munhofen

More resources, high schoolers with this mindset become the person colleges want, how your kid with adhd can score in the 99th percentile.

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Tourism and Travel: A Research Guide

Voluntourism.

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One growing area of tourism has come to be known as volunteer tourism  or voluntourism (sometimes referred to as volunteer travel). This combines the traditional aspects of tourism with voluntary service. In some cases, it can be related to sustainable tourism and sometimes to ecotourism. While the concept has been around for many years, it has seen rapid growth in more recent years. One of the earlier reports on this topic that looked at numbers was from 2008 when Tourism Research and Marketing (TRAM) surveyed 300 organizations in their Volunteer Tourism : A Global Analysis . Another way to look at this emerging trend is to understand the impacts of volunteerism, as can be seen in the frequently cited article, "AIDS orphan tourism: A threat to young children in residential care" by Linda M. Richter & Amy Norman (in Vulnerable Children and Youth Studies ).

A fair bit of research and discussion in this area is likely to appear in news and trade literature sources so see the Subscription Databases section of this guide for sources for trade related articles. Much of what is written can be very specific with regards to geography or situation. Many of the articles look at the success of the volunteers and not as much at the overall numbers. We have also tried to include resources that provide data and information that will help researchers develop their own market profile. You can use our Doing Industry Research guide for more information on search strategies and using SIC/NAICS codes in industry research specifically with relation to Census data.

Print Resources

The following materials link to fuller bibliographic information in the Library of Congress Online Catalog . Links to digital content are provided when available. Also, see the General Resources section as some of the books included there get into specific areas as part of the larger sector.

• International Conference on Tourism Research Tunkkari-Eskelinen, M., & Röntynen, R. Designing a Model of Commercial Voluntourism Services. International Conference on Tourism Research, June 2023. There as been a reconsideration of tourism types and other activity involving travelling, such as voluntourism which had usually been seen as volunteering rather than tourism. This paper looks specifically at Finland and how the rest of the world sees this activity.

There are websites that aggregate opportunities that can be used by someone looking to understand the types of opportunities and where the opportunities are located that can be helpful in understanding the types and locations of opportunities, we have only included two but there are others though many do charge potential volunteers for placements. This can be helpful for someone wanted to understand "the market" but we have not included them. If you want to explore the opportunities in order to understand them search on the following:

• "volunteer travel"
• "volunteer abroad"
• "voluntourism abroad"
• "voluntourism opportunities"

Another option is to search on particular situations - particularly on major event or natural disasters.

• International Volunteer HQ External IVHQ is part of the HQ Travel Group and has year-round opportunities across Africa, Asia, Europe, the USA, Central America, South America, the Caribbean, the Pacific and the Middle East.
• Projects Abroad External This is a provider of international volunteering, internships and meaningful travel experiences that has been in business over 30 years.
• Volunteer travel: experts raise concerns over unregulated industry External This is an article published by the Guardian on January 13, 2016.
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Volunteer Tourism Essay

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Introduction

Motivations for participants in volunteer tourism, benefits of volunteer experience, relation to reference material and theories of tourist motivation and behavior, reference list.

Volunteer tourism is undertaken by the tourists in the local communities where they volunteer to help the by helping eliminating material poverty. It is an alternative form of tourism because the tourists opt to make their travel locally.

The main motivation of this kind of tourism is to volunteer in working for the host community as the tourists learn more about their culture and other things. They satisfy the desire to work but not to be just tourists. They work for no pay in the communities that they travel to and this benefits in providing free labor, though short term to the host country or community.

There are other tourists that are motivated by the desire to give (Sin, 2009, 487-491). When they visit these communities they try to alleviate poverty materials by giving items to the people. The needy people benefits from these items and the tourists are satisfied. They argue that they feel good when they give. There are other tourists that participate in volunteer tourism in order to contribute to the host community in any way possible.

This is done through community service activities that these participants undertake. They do volunteer work that help the community and they themselves feel that they have contributed to the community.

Others argue that they learn a lot through community service because they get a chance to interact with the people in the community and learn a lot from them. They learn cultural differences between different communities and how they differ from each other. They also learn how the reception is done by different communities and how they differ from each other.

According to (Sin, 2009, 487-491), volunteers in this kind of tourism are also motivated by the desire to try themselves out in doing something.

There are people who engage in it in order to try whether they can do volunteering. This is mostly for people who are doing it for the first time and who are curious to know whether they are capable of doing it. This motivation has increased volunteer tourism in most countries. People also do it in order to try their ability in doing some activities. They test their capability in doing that particular activity.

Volunteer experience causes intrinsic motivation which is a result of mutually beneficial interaction. The intrinsic motivations tries to satisfy intrinsic needs like self actualization and therefore the tourists will feel satisfied when they are in volunteer travels. This is basically for people seeking self actualization (Stebbins & Graham, 2004, 28).

The host community and the tourists benefits from the volunteer tourism. The host community gets help from the tourists while the tourists gain satisfaction from the tour. The benefits of volunteer tourism are built by both the host community and the tourists. The level of interaction also determines the level of satisfaction. The tourists have to prove beneficial to the community so that the community can create a good environment for tourists.

As stated by McIntosh & Zahra (2007, 549-550), volunteer tourism gives somebody a meaningful self experience as one interacts with the local people in the host community. Volunteers get to learn more about the culture of other people and compare with their own culture. One learns to appreciate other people and to help them in times of their needs.

One of the volunteers interviewed by McIntosh & Zahra argued that he learned to give support to those in needs as he learned that he was better than them (McIntosh & Zahra (2007, 549-550). In other words, volunteer tourism enables somebody to interact with people and know them better, their culture and that some need your help. Volunteer tourism also enables the tourists to experience a cheaper travel than what other forms of tourism would cost them.

To travel as a tourist is more expensive than when one is doing volunteering. There are usually subsidies offered to volunteer tourism. For instance, the universities subsidize trips for students to other countries where they go as volunteers. The volunteers find it cheaper than the actual tourism.

They therefore travel to volunteer because of the cost effectiveness associated with the volunteer tourism. The tourists also gains interpersonal experience as they interact with the people in the host communities. They enjoy moments of sharing about their lives and cultural differences (Guttentag, 2009, 549).

They also builds bold and genuine relationships with the host community as they continue interacting with them and this gives them the desire to travel again to that particular communities and others to make more friends. Volunteer tourism also enables the tourists to know many local places in the host country.

The tourists travel to the local communities helping them in doing activities and then giving material things. This exposure allows the tourists to know more about the local communities; their activities, locations, believes and values among others. This is different from the formal tourism where the tourists only visit the tourist sites in a country but will not have chances to know other places in that community.

One of the basic theories of motivation suggests that tourism is basically done to satisfy the psychological needs of the tourist. These are the intrinsic needs that a person feels from within and seeks their satisfaction (Rogers, 2007, 23). For volunteer tourism, the tourists also have the desire to satisfy the intrinsic needs or the self actualization needs. The volunteer tourism therefore has some aspects of the formal tourism as far as the needs are concerned.

The only notable difference is the activities the tourists in the two kinds of tourism are involved in. in volunteer tourism, the tourists engage themselves in volunteer activities and they derive their satisfaction from them. In formal tourism, the tourists obtain their satisfaction from touring the tourist magnificent sites that are present in that country and not through the volunteer activities in the local communities.

Volunteer tourism is becoming very common in many parts of the country. People prefer it because of the fulfilling experience it gives them. People are motivated by different factors in doing the volunteer travels

Guttentag, D. A. (2009). “The possible negative impacts of volunteer tourism”. International Journal of Tourism Research , 11: 537-551

McIntosh, A.J. & Zahra, A. 2007. A cultural encounter through volunteer tourism: Towards the ideals of sustainable tourism. Journal of Sustainable Tourism , 15(5): 541-556.

Rogers, M. (2007). “Volunteerism is on the rise”. In Travel Agent , 17 September, 20-24.

Sin, H.L. 2009. Volunteer tourism – ‘involve me and I will learn’? Annals of Tourism Research , 36(3): 480-501.

Stebbins, R.A. & Graham M.M. 2004. Volunteering as Leisure- Leisure as Volunteering An International Perspective Wallingford: CABI

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IvyPanda. (2019, April 20). Volunteer Tourism. https://ivypanda.com/essays/volunteer-tourism-essay/

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Voluntourism on the rise: a call to reexamine how we help

Caroline Ashford Arya

Olivia Gilbert September 22, 2016

We have all seen this photo on social media: a varying number of white people are surrounded by a varying number of smiling brown or black children. The backdrop is vaguely exotic–perhaps the white people are even sporting ‘native’ clothing. The whole thing is tied together with a nebulous quote related to giving back, gratefulness and how much the person posting the photo has been changed by his or her experience.

While the photo described above has emerged as the stereotypical depiction of the growing global phenomenon of ‘voluntourism,’ in which tourists pay to volunteer abroad or in their home country, many forms of voluntourism are far subtler. On Monday, September 12, 24-year-old writer Pippa Biddle spoke to the Whitman community about the allures and ills of voluntourism at a lecture hosted by the Student Engagement Center. Biddle’s lecture began with a photo of her own, a riff on the one described above, in which a 16-year-old Biddle sits smiling with three young Dominican girls, a moment from a service trip in the Dominican Republic.

Biddle defines voluntourism as “any engagement that involves volunteering in a place that is not your home community and that typically involves touristic experiences.” While voluntourism is typically thought of as occurring outside of one’s own country, Biddle stresses it can take place anywhere there are different levels of development: think rural West Virginia versus New York City. After participating in a variety of short-term volunteer projects abroad as a teenager, Biddle was troubled by a growing doubt about her long-term impact on the communities in which she volunteered. Biddle critically examines the voluntourism industry in her internationally renowned essay, “The Problem with Little White Girls (and Boys): Why I Stopped Becoming a Voluntourist.” Biddle has since made clear the problem with voluntourism is “not just about little white girls, but…privilege does matter, and it matters a lot.”

The bulk of voluntourists are wealthy white people traveling to less-developed places populated by mostly non-white people. The majority of trips last less than four weeks. According Nancy Gard McGehee, an expert on sustainable tourism at Virginia Tech University, 10 million people engage in voluntourism globally each year and contribute to a growing industry worth around 2 billion dollars.

Part of the problem is where all that money goes. While volunteers pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to go on a trip, most of that money is spent on transportation and food purchased from corporate sources far from the community to which volunteers travel. Precious little of that $2 billion actually finds its way to the local economy. This problem has a name: economic leakage. Instead of creating opportunities for community development, volunteers typically engage in short term projects–they build libraries, replace roofs and play games with orphans–and neglect to foster community ownership of these projects.

“[Volunteers have] done nothing by being there to make it more likely that [the local population] will be able to afford [the projects] themselves, or that they’ll be able to invest in their own furtherance of their lifestyle and be able to have a better future,” Biddle said.

Biddle explains this trend through the Courtney Martin’s concept of ‘reductive seduction.’ “We really like to look to somewhere else, take what they’re dealing with, reduce it down to as small of a problem as we can and then try to solve it over and over and over again,” Biddle said. By equating saving Africa with building a school or pulling Haiti out of poverty with a couple weeks spent teaching English, voluntourism programs reduce a country’s problems to a small, concrete and achievable-in-two weeks tasks. This provides volunteers a sense of satisfaction and the feeling that they have made a real impact when in fact they may have done more harm than good. The culture of aid fostered by voluntourism programs “has actually created local cultures that are highly reliant if not entirely reliant in certain places…on aid,” Biddle said. She paraphrased an idea developed in Robert Lupton’s book “Toxic Charity”: “Give once and you elicit appreciation, give twice and you create anticipation, give three times and you create expectation, give four times and it becomes entitlement, and give five times and you establish a dependency,” Biddle said.

This does not mean that volunteering is useless. But it does call for a critical re-evaluation of how we engage in service. Biddle explained that because voluntourists are central to voluntourism,“[they] have the ability…to shift where everything is going and to…challenge the problem that we’re dealing with here as far as actually creating systemic long term change in communities that need help but don’t necessarily need our hands, physically.” It feels good to help other people, but ultimately, Biddle said, “the success of a volunteer experience should not be based on how a volunteer feels after it. It should be based on the actual outcomes to the places where that volunteer is going.”

Pairing Education with Service

Senior Lindsay Ross is an intern for Whitman’s Spring Break Service Trip (SBST) program, which according to the Whitman SBST website, coordinates “week-long volunteer trips that allow Whitman students to focus on a particular social issue outside of the Walla Walla community.”

Last spring Ross led an SBST to the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (CTUIR) about an hour south of Whitman. In order to combat the negative aspects of voluntourism, Ross and her volunteers “try and be really intentional about what we’re doing and why we’re going.” SBST’s are “all focused on working with community partners that are already active in the community” rather than entering a place with assumptions about what is needed.

Ross emphasized the trip’s focus on education, which nearly outweighed the amount of service they did. The trip was almost 100 percent planned by tribal members rather than Whitman students. Sean Terada 16’, a participant on the CTUIR trip, concurred. Students met with the tribal council who explained how they run things and what their goals are.

“It was kind of a learning experience for all of us. Figuring out what kind of relationship we wanted to have with the reservation as a college because we saw that this was something that we could create a long term relationship with,” Terada said.

Terada, a native Hawaiian, noted the socioeconomic similarities between that of native Hawaiians and Native Americans on the reservation. Both groups exhibit high levels of poverty and low levels of education.

“But I had never really experienced the Native American side of that, so that was a really interesting way to connect those and compare them,” Terada said. The emphasis on education-based trips echo Biddle’s own pursuit to create more meaningful tourism. Biddle belongs to the board of Onwards, a non-profit that offers trips rooted in education in places like the Dominican Republic and Guatemala. Rather than engaging participants in superficial forms of service, Onwards seeks to educate travelers about local issues so that tourists “walk away more empowered [and] more ready to do meaningful work in the future,” Biddle said.

Onwards fosters local development by providing micro-loans to local businesses in the tourism sector, allowing the community to capture more of the money tourism brings. “The question isn’t ‘how do we keep white people out?’ It’s ‘how do we create a strong community that can engage with this in a way that makes us stronger as a community?’” Biddle said. By keeping tourism dollars in the community, the local population is able to achieve progress through their own work.

The Ambiguity of Aid

First years Cameron Conner and Grant Gallaher spent much of the past year working in Nepal to implement disaster relief after the April 2015 earthquake that killed thousands of people and altered the lives of many more.

The two worked through Conscious Connections, a nonprofit Cameron and his parents founded in 2014 as an extension of his parents’ fair trade business, Ganesh Himal Trading. By tapping into the fair trade company’s base of reliable, trusting relationships formed over thirty years of mutually beneficial business, Conner and Gallaher arranged for aid to be distributed by local people to earthquake victims weeks before any international organizations in the area. The pair spent two weeks performing an evaluation of this initial round of aid.

”Our evaluation found that because of our small scale and our really reliable connections we were able to have some of the most necessary aid,” Conner said. “We knew exactly what was needed and tried not to give superfluous items to people.”

Conner and Gallaher’s success with administering disaster relief highlights the importance of what many voluntourism programs lack: a true understanding of the needs of an area and the relationships with the local population to effectively implement aid.

Conscious Connections performs a variety of aid-based functions for the district of Dhading where it is located, including educational scholarships and a health clinic. Despite the success with administering relief after the earthquake, Conner explained, “No matter how good a relationship you have within a community,” it is difficult to build community ownership when the relationship is one of givers and receivers.

That is why Conner believes “everything aid related is fundamentally flawed.” “There’s still a paternal-ish relationship. As much as you respect the other person, you are in a position of power.”

That is why Conner sees businesses like his parents’ as “one of the best ways to kind of circumvent [unequal power relations] because trade naturally builds mutual ownership.” Gallaher urges people to continue to seek volunteer opportunities despite the hazards of voluntourism.

“I don’t want that to ever stop people from looking for ways to make a difference in those sorts of places. I just think people need to think more critically about what they’re doing.” While Gallaher would like to go back to Nepal some day, he is not sure if he would return as a volunteer or a tourist. After the earthquake, Nepal’s tourism industry decreased by up to 80 percent in some areas, so “in a lot of ways what Nepal needs right now is just tourists,” Gallaher said.

Conner urges students to “look within your own community” to find volunteer opportunities. “It just so happens that I have a wonderful community in Nepal.”

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• Grant Gallaher
• Lindsay Ross
• Olivia Gilbert
• Pippa Biddle
• sean terada
• volunteering
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What Is Voluntourism? Does It Help or Harm Communities?

Are tourists' good intentions misplaced or actually effective?

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Voluntourism is a type of tourism in which travelers participate in volunteer work, usually for a charity or a non-profit. While the term sometimes applies to domestic travel, a majority of voluntourism takes place abroad. Most often, voluntourists travel for the specific purpose of volunteering in an organized way for specific causes, but others simply include volunteer aspects to a traditional vacation experience.

According to Save the Children, a charity that provides humanitarian aid for children worldwide, about 1.6 million people volunteer overseas each year. Voluntourism is considered the fastest-growing travel trend, and tourists sometimes pay up to $2,000 per week to be a part of it. All in all, the industry itself is worth an estimated $2.6 billion per year.

Many voluntourism programs positively impact their communities and help fulfill a need that will continue to benefit the destination long after the volunteers have left. However, it's becoming clear that some of these organizations could be taking advantage of both their participants and their causes for the sake of financial gain.

How to Be a Responsible Volunteer Tourist

• Before committing to an organization, reach out to past volunteers to hear their experience or read reviews.
• If you have a special skill or expertise in a specific field, look for organizations that train and empower local staff. That way, you are making a lifelong impact for an entire community rather than a temporary one.
• Research the organization's credentials.
• Avoid organizations that encourage handling of animals when it is not veterinary, research, or conservation-related.
• Highlight projects that are run or managed by the local community.
• Seek out projects that are genuinely needed in the destinations where you want to volunteer. Ask yourself if the volunteer work provides a "band-aid" fix or a long-term solution to a local issue.

Voluntourism Definition

In brief, voluntourism is a joining of "volunteering" and "tourism." Many volunteers travel to areas where there’s the most need, whether it's for time, money, medical services, or training. Most companies will set a volunteer up with lodging (oftentimes a homestay with a local family), meals, and even help organize flight itineraries and information on visa requirements or travelers insurance.

Voluntourism seems like the perfect combination of traveling and giving back, but it must be done right in order to have a positive effect. Good intentions only get you so far, it’s all about keeping an open mind and doing the research to ensure that those good intentions produce sustainably beneficial results.

Types of Voluntourism

There are hundreds of voluntourism programs out there offering legitimate ways to contribute to poverty alleviation, environmental issues, social justice, and more.

One of the most popular forms of voluntourism, which can consist of teaching English or creating educational resources in poor communities. 

Child Care 

Working in orphanages, for example, or interacting with children to enhance their well-being and development. Also working with disadvantaged youth and refugees seeking temporary asylum.

Health Care

Those in the medical field can travel to underserved communities administering vaccines or educating about diseases and how to prevent them.

Conservation

Projects can consist of both animal conservation and environmental conservation, where volunteers work at an animal sanctuary or conduct research in the field, for example, by tracking native species. Participants may also work on reforestation projects or trail maintenance to help support local ecosystems.

Community Support

Building homes, schools, libraries, or other types of infrastructure. This can also include women empowerment or working to reduce social inequalities within a specific community.

Pros and Cons

It’s safe to say that most of those who sign up to volunteer abroad do so with the best intentions; in most cases, it is the specific organization or the nature of the volunteer work that presents issues. But it begs the question, can altruism in tourism get in the way of actual impact? And if so, how can you tell if a voluntourism program is helping rather than hurting?

The media has exposed cases of orphanages in Nepal full of children who aren’t truly orphans or travelers who discover volunteer programs that exploit natural disasters for financial gain. Back in 2018, journalist Tina Rosenberg wrote a piece for the Guardian about a company in Guatemala that scouts mountain villages for sick infants , calling on volunteers to collect them instead of taking them directly to the hospital, which could purposely delay critical care.

There are even cases where travelers themselves volunteer for the wrong reasons, as demonstrated in the video below created by Radi-Aid , a Norwegian project that seeks to challenge perceptions around issues of poverty and development.

Pro: Experiencing New Cultures

Traveling helps us gain a new perspective on the world that can translate into other positives in our lives, and staying outside the typical tourist route can enhance that experience. Spending more time within a local community, for instance, will certainly provide a much more authentic experience than sitting in a resort sipping cocktails. The Center for Responsible Travel reported in 2019 that people who travel regularly are 35 times more likely to donate to nonprofits than non-travelers over their lifetimes.

Much like sustainable tourism as a whole, the legitimacy or success of a voluntourism program depends highly on how it is managed. When done the right way, it can help communities grow and truly provide benefits to a specific cause. But it’s up to the individual volunteer, too, who has the added responsibility of staying informed and setting their destinations up for success.

Pro: Some Organizations Are Honest and Effective

Voluntourism can absolutely be an effective tool for achieving positive changes in global communities that need help, but it sometimes comes down to the volunteers themselves to do the work in sorting out the good from the bad.

Ken Budd, author of the award-winning memoir The Voluntourist , argues that not all volunteer programs are created equal , and countless organizations around the world create lasting results. The writer’s experience speaks for itself (he’s volunteered in at least six countries), such as teaching English in a Costa Rican elementary school that relied on volunteers when they couldn't afford teachers, or a climate change program in Ecuador where scientists could run more research projects thanks to volunteer labor.

Con: Dishonesty Among Volunteer Companies

Perhaps one of the worst products of dishonest voluntourism comes from orphanage scams. Since they may receive additional funding with each child or rely on volunteer donations, there is an incentive to recruit more children into their system.

According to an investigation by Lumos, an NGO that fights against the institutionalization of children, total funding for orphanages in Haiti ranged upwards of $100 million per year; that’s enough to send 770,000 Haitian children to school or pay the Haitian child protection agency’s annual budget over 130 times.

The study also found that, of the 30,000 children living in the country's orphanages, an estimated 80% had at least one living parent. Lumos suggested diverting orphanage funds into programs that support families and enable them to appropriately care for their children — instead of promoting the orphanage business.

In a similar scenario, a 2015 study by UNICEF found that 79% of teenage children in Cambodian orphanages had at least one living parent.

Con: Tourists Could Take Work From Locals

A reporter for the New York Times wrote in 2016 about their experience with a group of missionaries building a school in Haiti :

“Watching those missionaries make concrete blocks that day in Port-au-Prince, I couldn’t help wondering if their good intentions were misplaced. These people knew nothing about how to construct a building. Collectively they had spent thousands of dollars to fly here to do a job that Haitian bricklayers could have done far more quickly. Imagine how many classrooms might have been built if they had donated that money rather than spending it to fly down themselves. Perhaps those Haitian masons could have found weeks of employment with a decent wage. Instead, at least for several days, they were out of a job.”

If an organization can get free labor from an unskilled volunteer, they’re not spending money hiring locals to do the same work for a fee. In a poverty-stricken economy where residents are already struggling to find jobs, funds that go towards digging a well or building a school will have more of an impact if they stay within the local economy.

Taking work from locals can also result in inferior products or prevent developing communities from self-establishment. Not to mention, volunteers who are untrained in whatever service they are providing can sometimes actually end up hindering progress. Pippa Biddle, who writes about her experiences with the global volunteer economy , has recounted building libraries in Tanzania and watching more skilled local workers come in each night to fix mistakes.

How to Identify a Legitimate Voluntourism Opportunity

• Reputable voluntourism organizations usually provide training or use specific criteria to select volunteers.
• Qualifications are required for certain roles, such as background checks if you plan to work with children or medical field experience for medical volunteer positions.
• The organization provides guidance on travel insurance, flight information, visas, and other travel requirements.
• The work doesn’t involve jobs that can take employment opportunities from residents, but instead finds ways to include or benefit them.

" The Truth About Volunteerism ." Save the Children .

" The Case for Responsible Travel: Trends and Statistics 2019 ." Center for Responsible Travel .

" Funding Haitian Orphanages at the Cost of Children's Rights ." LUMOS .

https://lumos.contentfiles.net/media/assets/file/Funding_Haiti_Orphanages_Executive_Summary_Digital_Version.pdf

" A Statistical Profile of Child Protection in Cambodia ." UNICEF .

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What is voluntourism? Everything you need to know

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From a sustainability point of view, the idea of voluntourism – the combination of volunteering and tourism – sounds so admirable. Here’s a travel narrative that swaps frivolous consumption for working on projects that benefit people. And, on paper at least, it fulfils the growing demand for authentic and experiential travel. The voluntourists return home feeling they’ve achieved something useful; the voluntouristed receive some improvements to their daily lives. A connection is made. Everyone’s happy.

But if only it were that simple. Some projects do, of course, have a real impact, but the voluntourism model is more convoluted than it seems. A couple of decades ago, voluntourism was a marginal pursuit; over the past few years, as click-and-go technology has developed, it has become a booming business worth around £1.4 billion a year, and one of the fastest growing areas of travel. A badge of honour; a useful paragraph on the CV. And it’s not just channelling youthful enthusiasm but attracting families keen to expand their children’s horizons, and middle-aged empty-nesters looking for more meaningful experiences – the latter make up well over 50 per cent of volunteers, according to some figures. As such trips become more accessible, ruthless businesses are cashing in and dropping ill-equipped helpers into situations where they might not be helping at all.

The biggest problem, says Nicola Shepherd, founder of The Explorations Company , is when a client with no relevant skills ‘wants to teach at a “third world” school when they have no experience, no idea about the local curriculum, and no understanding of the long-term effect of dropping in and out again’. ‘But,’ she explains ‘when the skill set is that of a doctor, then their involvement can have a real long-term benefit to a community.’

Anecdotally, there are countless voluntourism examples that read like fairy-tale parables. The London family who went to Peru to help build a school and spent five days making bricks in a dusty Andean village, while the local brick-makers stood around bemused, before wandering off to watch TV in the backpackers’ lodge to fill their unexpected week off. Of wells being constructed so badly that the volunteers’ work had to be redone every night by builders; the travellers in Swaziland who spent a fortnight painting the walls of a lavatory block at a campsite that had obviously just been painted by the last shipment of overseas visitors.

Voluntourists are not, generally, trained medical staff heading out to heal. Those people are in the refugee camps, or working for the UN. And with plenty of underemployed unskilled labour in the developing world, why fly across the world to dig a well? ‘Most people volunteer with the best of intentions,’ explains Philip Goodwin, the CEO of Voluntary Service Overseas , which has been placing people abroad since the late 1950s. ‘But there is a risk that volunteers can end up doing more harm than good if they are working on projects which don’t serve the needs of the communities they’ve come to help.’ As a case in point, VSO only advertises for professionals, and for a minimum of 12-month placements, to make sure they have a lasting impact, while The African Leadership University , based in Rwanda and Mauritius , is another good example, encouraging long-term volunteers to join and transfer their skills – its latest two-year recruit is Mzamo Masito, the chief marketing officer at Google Africa.

‘I’m torn about the subject because people want to give back... but it needs to be meaningful,’ says Bruce Poon Tip, founder of Canadian-based G Adventures , which has partnered with Friends International’s ChildSafe Movement to implement a set of protection guidelines. ‘And travellers should never work in schools or orphanages.’ Non-profit organisation ReThink Orphanages estimates that 80 per cent of the eight million children living in such institutions have a family who could care for them. There’s a reason they don’t exist in the UK any more. G Adventures no longer offers voluntourism trips, instead integrating community tourism experiences into its itineraries and fundraising to support local projects such as female -only taxi drivers in Delhi and grassroots restaurants in Peru. In the developing world, money tends to go a long way – the amount that one westerner can spend on a two-week holiday could instead pay several local salaries for months.

The other major criticism of voluntourism is that it encourages the ‘white saviour’ mentality. Social media has been a good weather-vane, with accounts springing up to ridicule privileged westerners in ‘poverty tourism’ situations. One called @BarbieSavior shows the doll’s imaginary volunteering adventures, posing with a small black doll and saying ‘I sacrificed my daily beauty regimen to visit the local “hospital.”’ Comic Relief recently announced it is doing away with celebrity trips to developing countries and instead using local filmmakers and photographers. As No White Saviors , an anti-racist Ugandan-based advocacy group which challenges how aid and development functions in Africa , puts it: ‘We never said “no white people”, we just said you shouldn’t be the hero of the story.’

In some instances, though, projects simply wouldn’t exist without volunteers. Responsible Travel organises trips to a conservation project in Zimbabwe , where visitors can help the local team to observe and record rhino and elephant behaviour, and repair enclosures. And while it might not describe them as voluntourism, AndBeyond’s Impact Journeys allow guests to take part in rhino dehorning, bird tagging and lion tracking.

Perhaps it’s time we broadened our definition of the phrase into something more all-encompassing. Citizen-science projects thrive on more people taking part, even something as simple as sharing photos of whales spotted on a cruise. Swoop Antarctica works with the Happywhale platform to upload pictures and help scientific research, while Biosphere Expeditions takes travellers into the Armenian mountains to survey lynx, bears and wolves, and many of the other projects supported by the UK’s activist-inspired Responsible Travel involve wildlife. Aiding conservation rather than people-based experiences may be the most rewarding way of channelling that desire to make a change, while raising money for NGOs that hire local labour might be the most pragmatic. Of course, another alternative would be to go on holiday, relax, then volunteer in the nearest food bank when you return home.

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Local volunteers build a new school f​unded by a French N​GO in a village near Yuwang, China.

5 myths about voluntourism

Voluntourism opportunities aren't all created equal—here are five common stereotypes.

Criticizing voluntourism seems almost as popular as voluntourism itself. After stories surfaced about Cambodian orphanages exploiting children (many of whom weren’t orphans) to attract altruistic tourists, reporters and bloggers continue their assault.

The media criticism, though well-intentioned, takes a frustratingly one-dimensional view, portraying volunteers as young, selfie-obsessed do-gooders with savior complexes . If you believe what you read, voluntourism is a neocolonialist activity. Yet most critics have never volunteered abroad. Others were turned off by a single volunteer experience. And though media coverage remains focused on local impact, reporting rarely includes local perspectives, which seems—dare I say—neocolonialistic.

Related: 10 places that deserve more travelers

As a six-time volunteer, I’ve asked many of the questions raised by critics: Does voluntourism create dependency? What qualifies unskilled travelers to work in other countries? Here’s a look at five common stereotypes about voluntourism, and why it’s time for a refresh:

Only volunteers benefit.

Volunteer labor isn’t perfect. Construction projects can take longer than necessary, skeptics note, because local workers need to manage and train volunteers—and fix their mistakes.

Voluntourism focuses more on feeling good than doing good, critics say. Jane Karigo, a Kenyan woman who founded a children’s home where I worked near Mombasa, recalls a volunteer who gave a child an iPod, igniting jealous infighting among the residents. Another took the kids to a go-kart track, which Jane viewed as a frivolous waste of resources. “They will not care about go-karts when they are hungry,” she noted.

Yet the scores of volunteers I’ve met in my travels seemed genuine about helping others. Of course, selflessness always involves personal gain. It gives us pleasure. But that doesn’t mean volunteering can’t produce results.

When I worked on a climate change program in Ecuador , the scientists were able to run more research projects with help from volunteer labor. In China , volunteers worked with college students who were learning English. It was a valuable service: the students knew the language, but needed practice speaking it. In the process, they learned about America while the volunteers learned about China.

Spontaneous exchanges like these are one of the many intangible benefits of volunteering. These benefits, argues Daniela Papi, founder of Learning Service , an advocacy group working to help people rethink volunteer travel, often get overlooked—“the friendships, the cross-cultural learning, and the life changes it inspires in volunteers who hopefully shift how they live, travel, and give in the future.”

Voluntourism hurts local economies.

Generosity can have unexpected repercussions. After volunteering in Cambodia , Papi discovered that giving shoes and water filters to residents—actions she’d been encouraged to take on other volunteer trips—can divert business from local markets. Critics also charge that volunteer labor steals jobs, though Papi, who now approaches voluntourism with skepticism, disagrees: “The negative impact is the money and energy going into Band-Aid solutions rather than higher prioritized local needs.”

Yet even experts who believe free labor can hurt local employment see economic benefits.

“There is no doubt that some volunteer programs shift jobs from locals to potentially less skilled labor,” says Shannon O’Donnell, author of The Volunteer Traveler’s Handbook . But she cautions against assuming this is the case in every scenario . “Many volunteer programs hire locals in other capacities: families to host and feed volunteers, shops that sell snacks and souvenirs.”

International volunteering is part of a complex ecosystem that can, when done well, help a community grow in a direction they support. Shannon O’Donnell

In Costa Rica , my wife and I taught English at a rural elementary school. The principal used volunteers because he couldn’t afford an English teacher. It wasn’t a choice between volunteers and paid teachers; it was a choice between volunteers and not offering English class. As a volunteer in post-Katrina New Orleans , I counted spending money in the tourist-starved city among my most valuable contributions.

“The media tends to annihilate programs from a single economic aspect,” says O’Donnell. “But international volunteering is part of a complex ecosystem that can, when done well, help a community grow in a direction they support.”

Every project involves children in developing countries.

“I find it absurd when all volunteering is painted with the same brush,” says Kirsty Henderson, author of The Underground Guide to International Volunteering . “Would people make negative comments if I volunteered with vulnerable kids in my hometown? I’m more culturally prepared to work there than in Thailand .”

While kids are the focus of many projects, voluntourism opportunities are manifold. Earthwatch , an environmental science organization, offers projects as varied as archaeological excavations near Hadrian’s Wall and scientific research at the Great Barrier Reef .

Programs are available throughout the United States, from trail maintenance with the American Hiking Society to animal welfare work with the Humane Society . The community-run Apostle Islands Sled Dog Race in Bayfield, Wisconsin, has been called a model voluntourism program by Voluntourism.org . Volunteer jobs include handling dogs, helping mushers, and assisting at checkpoints.

“You can volunteer at a school in Kenya, but you can also do accounting for an environmental agency in the United Kingdom,” Henderson argues. “Volunteering is simply the act of giving your time for free.”

All volunteers are college students.

When I volunteered in China with Global Volunteers , 11 Americans participated and only one was under the age of 40. In the Ecuadorian Andes, our crew included a sexagenarian Canadian, a septuagenarian Australian—and zero college students. In Costa Rica I met an 80-year-old volunteer with Cross-Cultural Solutions who later worked in Thailand.

“[Baby] Boomers volunteering overseas is a huge trend,” says O’Donnell. “They have a deep interest in finding projects that resonate within their own lives and supporting those projects for years. They understand that change occurs gradually.”

As for supposedly selfie-obsessed young volunteers, many Millennials use volunteering as a springboard to humanitarian careers. Tenteleni , a U.K.-based volunteer group, recently published a piece on 14 program alumni whose jobs now range from teaching to social work. Selfies are part of voluntourism, admits O’Donnell, “but this happens more with tour programs offering a feel-good pop-in visit to an orphanage—which is really pseudo volunteering.”

Voluntourism creates dependency.

Dependency is a problem, and it’s not just about giving local people money or things, says Papi. “It’s about selling an image of poverty to Westerners and saying that—just by being them , without any responsibility to learn, shift, or qualify—they can ‘help.’”

The negative stories, however, assume that all volunteer programs create dependency. The misconception may be a product of semantics. “Volunteer” implies offering services to people in need while “tourist” denotes camera-clad gawkers. The result? “Voluntourist” becomes a dirty word.

In a research paper for Voluntourist.org, Carlos Palacios, Ph.D., of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia , argues that voluntourism is the only type of travel that’s vilified as colonialistic. Programs that describe themselves as service learning, cultural exchange, or educational tourism “have not got into this kind of trouble,” he notes.

I came to see myself more as an intern than a volunteer: someone who did small but necessary work—dish washing, data entry, trash collecting—while receiving an education about a place and its challenges. I was taught by women like Jane Kargio in Kenya and Zhang Tao, who formed a special needs school in China despite few resources and long-held prejudices toward children with autism and developmental disabilities. These women are action heroes—the most impressive, committed people I’ve ever met.

“We call it volunteering or service learning, implying that we are helping, and as a byproduct we are learning, but that is backwards,” Papi says. “Learning service—learning how to serve the rest of our lives by how we live—is the biggest impact. We sell a lie when we call it volunteering and make it seem like success comes from changing someone else.”

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The Pandemic Changed The World Of 'Voluntourism.' Some Folks Like The New Way Better

Malaka Gharib

Last summer, Becca Morrison, 21, was all set to volunteer at a community arts nonprofit in Zomba, Malawi. She'd work with the marketing team as a copywriter and social media manager.

Then the pandemic hit, and the trip got canceled. "I was peeved," she says. "I was so excited to travel. I had the whole thing planned."

Still, Morrison was determined to find a volunteer gig, which she needed to graduate as an international development major at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, U.K. So she found another opportunity in Zomba, this time with a nonprofit group called the Sparkle Foundation . And it would take place virtually.

For three months last summer, Morrison helped the group — which runs a school and a medical facility for children in the community — do tasks remotely. She even personally raised $7,000 for the cause.

"I've done so much without even leaving my house, my room," she says. "I think the pandemic has changed the game completely for volunteering."

Becca Morrison, 21, at home in Norwich, U.K. She has been volunteering virtually with an arts nonprofit in Zomba, Malawi from her bedroom. Becca Morrison hide caption

Becca Morrison, 21, at home in Norwich, U.K. She has been volunteering virtually with an arts nonprofit in Zomba, Malawi from her bedroom.

The pandemic has indeed transformed the landscape of international volunteering, say researchers. A February survey of 130 volunteer organizations and 239 international volunteers by the International Forum for Volunteering in Development found that the pandemic had spurred volunteer groups to offer more remote volunteering opportunities and consider expanding national volunteer membership in the future.

Even as some groups gear for a return to the way it was, others are changing their modus operandi — and some of these new ways of working are a step in a more sustainable direction.

"The pandemic has shown us there are different innovative ways volunteers are able to provide services," says Christopher Millora , an academic based in Iloilo City, Philippines, who is leading research for the U.N.'s next State of the World's Volunteerism report. This could lead to a "paradigm shift as to what kinds of relationships international volunteer organizations have toward local communities."

That's an important move in an industry riddled with criticism. Over the past few decades, critics and activists have been urging volunteer abroad organizations to rethink their business model.

They say sending volunteers from rich nations to low-income countries perpetuates the white savior complex by portraying volunteers as superheroes who will rescue the poor from their misery.

"There's this postcolonial narrative of young, aspirational, light-skinned people from the West thinking they can go to Africa for two weeks and change the world," says Konstantinos Tomazos , a senior lecturer in international tourism management at the University of Strathclyde. "That's the main criticism of the sector that plays into the idea of the white messiah."

They say projects can be harmful and exploitative.

One of the most popular activities for volunteers, say the experts, is helping children in orphanages. That demand, as a result, has created perverse economic incentives . "In places like Kenya and Cambodia, Nepal and Tanzania, orphanages are prolific. But the children within them are not orphans and in many cases are being placed in orphanages in order for orphanage directors to profit from the [volunteer] tourism demand to engage with orphans," says Leigh Mathews , founder of Alto Global, an international development consultancy group and the co-founder of Rethink Orphanages, a group that helps volunteer groups terminate their orphanage programs and repatriate children with their families.

Volunteering Abroad? Read This Before You Post That Selfie

And some critics question the helpfulness of volunteers.

In Ours To Explore: Privilege, Power and the Paradox of Voluntourism , author Pippa Biddle writes about a shocking discovery she made while volunteering in Tanzania as a teen. She and a group of young, inexperienced volunteers were assigned to help local workers build a small library at an orphanage. Days into the project, she found out that every morning, the local workers were taking apart the volunteers' shoddy work from the day before and redoing it correctly before they woke up.

"While my intentions to be helpful and encouraging and to give back came from a good place, my time at the orphanage did not even begin to address their real needs," writes Biddle.

A major industry

Despite these criticisms, international volunteerism is a big business.

Since the mid-1800s, when trains and ships made it possible for the public to travel cheaper, faster and farther than ever before, people have strived to "voyage to less-resourced nations for pleasure and purpose," says Biddle.

The phenomenon of volunteer tourism is now a $3 billion a year industry, says Tomazos. The funds paid by participants go to the thousands of groups that coordinate the trips along with the development programs they support.

The money also benefits local economies. The volunteer organization Habitat for Humanity, for example, says their trips alone bring in an estimated $6.9 million to the drivers, hotels, restaurants and gift shops that serve international volunteers when they visit.

And while it's hard to pinpoint how many international volunteers there are in the world, the U.N. estimates that if volunteering were a full-time job, it would account for 109 million workers.

It's easy to understand the appeal of overseas service, says Biddle. There's a sense of adventure, and people feel good about helping those who are less fortunate. Studies have found that volunteers perceive the trips as a meaningful and transformative life experience . People often come away from the trips with feelings of improved well-being, purpose and happiness.

Advice To Parachuting Docs: Think Before You Jump Into Poor Countries

On a more practical note, "voluntourism" is a practical way for people — like Morrison — to gain experience in international development. Maia Gedde, author of Working in International Development and Humanitarian Assistance , says people hoping to start a career in the field "volunteer as a steppingstone to build skills, knowledge and networks to put them in a much stronger position when applying for humanitarian jobs in the future."

But not all volunteer programs are the same. In the world of international volunteerism, there are two kinds of gigs. One is volunteering with development programs, such as the Peace Corps in the U.S. and Voluntary Service Overseas in the U.K. These groups, often funded with government aid, assign volunteers to long-term projects around the world — a year or two or more working at a school in Malawi, for example, or supporting helping small business owners in India. Such programs typically provide the volunteers with basic accommodation and a modest allowance for food and other living expenses.

Then there's volunteer tourism — nicknamed "voluntourism" by academics. People pay to take part in shorter-term projects abroad, which can range from tutoring kids in Nepal for a week to spending a few months conducting nutrition workshops in Thailand to traveling with a church mission group to the Philippines to dig wells. Volunteers must pay for their journey, including flights and transportation, meals and lodging as well as fees to the organizations and the programs they support.

In-person trips not required?

During the pandemic, both the development programs and volunteer tourism groups have had to recalibrate their efforts. And some groups have been surprised by how eager volunteers were to stay involved — even though their trips to the field were canceled.

One of the most well-known groups in the latter category is Habitat for Humanity . Its Global Villages program invites people — mostly from Western countries — to help out in 30 mostly low- and middle-income countries. Over the course of about two weeks, groups of 15 people, half volunteers, half local staff, build homes, hand-washing and health-care facilities as well as participate in other kinds of projects. Volunteers do not need special skills but do need cash. There's a fee of about $1,650-$2,500 per person to participate, often raised through donations from friends and family. About 12,000 volunteers participate each year. During the pandemic, that number dropped to zero.

Despite that, many of the 800 projects planned for 2020 still got done, says Jacqueline Innocent , senior vice president of integrated programs at Habitat for Humanity. Local staff and paid contractors — mason workers, for example — pitched in. It just took a little longer because there were fewer helping hands.

Innocent was also pleased to see that many of the volunteers whose trips were canceled did not ask for a refund. They let Habitat keep the funds as a donation. And many organized their own virtual workshops, events and music festivals — to raise funds.

Dave Kovac, a 20-year veteran volunteer with Habitat for Humanity, speaks to students from his international service class at Oregon State University. For 10 weeks last fall, the class conducted a virtual Habitat build. Each week, the students checked in with Habitat staff in Vietnam as they built a house for a family in need. Natalie Kovac hide caption

Some volunteers even arranged "virtual builds." Dave Kovac is a 20-year Habitat volunteer veteran and teaches courses on international service at Oregon State University. He was scheduled to go on three trips with Habitat in 2020, including one with a cohort of students. When the trips were canceled, he worked with Habitat to create an online program where students "adopted" a Habitat build in Vietnam. Over 10 weeks, Kovac and his students met weekly to fundraise, learn about Vietnamese culture, get updates from local staff about the project's progress and speak to the family whose house was being built.

The program was so successful that Kovac says he is trying it out again in August, this time with Habitat Brazil. He says he likes the model because it targets "people who are interested in some kind of experience but can't go abroad due to timing, job, personal issues, family. So maybe they can tag along virtually."

The virtual engagement made Habitat realize something, says Innocent. "We're not as dependent upon cross-border volunteers as one would have previously thought. It has been surprising how much people are willing to do [for Habitat] even though they don't get that reciprocal experience" of being there.

"I suspect," she adds, "what we're going to see when we're able to come back is more hybrid approaches" — creating opportunities like the virtual builds for international volunteers, for example.

But, she says, "I don't see a scenario at the moment where we would want to eliminate the [field] experience." The trip is what people love, she says — and local staff rely on those volunteers to help carry out the projects more quickly.

These virtual opportunities with reputable organizations offer "a wonderful alternative to on-the-ground voluntourism," says Biddle. They "bypass so many of the issues voluntourism creates and require the volunteers to show true commitment to a cause and a community — even from afar."

Greater appreciation for local volunteers

For other organizations, the pandemic has affirmed a decision they've made well before the crisis: recruiting more local volunteers instead of Westerners, says researcher Millora. And the pandemic has driven home the importance of these helpers.

Voluntary Service Overseas is a U.K.-based development organization that hires and places skilled volunteers in long-term projects in nearly 30 low- and middle-income countries.

But over the last few years, the group has been recruiting more in-country volunteers. "They're the ones who can hold the government accountable, who know the context," says Papa Diouf , who heads VSO's global work in health and is based in Kigali, Rwanda. Many of these volunteers are graduates from the School of Education at the University of Rwanda.

In the first few months of the pandemic, VSO Rwanda had to send its 50 international volunteers home. Because the group had a preexisting membership of 200 national volunteers, it was able to carry out its education program, says Diouf — training public school teachers to improve literacy and numeracy skills among primary school students.

OPINION: Volunteering Abroad Is Popular And Problematic. Let's Fix It

The international volunteers, who were brought on for their expertise in school leadership and education development, stayed involved ... virtually. Using Zoom and WhatsApp, they checked in with local volunteers, who were doing much of the in-person work — visiting schools and mentoring teachers. And when schools were shut in Rwanda due to COVID-19, it was the local volunteers who kept in touch with the schoolteachers via WhatsApp.

Diouf doesn't think VSO is going to end its practice of sending volunteers abroad anytime soon. The international volunteers have crucial expertise that the organization's projects need. In fact, now that some travel restrictions have been lifted, some of the international volunteers who were sent home from Rwanda at the start of the pandemic have returned.

But, he says, the pandemic helped him see how crucial local volunteers are, especially in times of crisis. VSO's Rwandan volunteers mobilized to spread COVID messaging in their country and track essential health services disrupted by COVID. Supporting "those local volunteers had already been a shift in our program thinking, but COVID-19 has only helped us move faster in that direction," he says.

Benjamin Lough , an associate professor at the School of Social Work at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a global volunteerism researcher, says VSO Rwanda's emphasis toward local service in the pandemic is "a great turn." But he has a caveat.

"The pandemic revealed both the strengths of relying on local volunteers as well as the limitations when support from abroad is lacking," he says. "We can't just pass on more responsibility to domestic volunteers without providing additional support" in the form of funds or manpower.

Booking again ... but with a difference

As vaccination rates soar in the West and more countries loosen COVID travel restrictions, volunteer groups have started offering trips again.

For many overseas service operations, those trips abroad are their bread and butter, says Tomazos, the tourism researcher from University of Strathclyde. "They have a business model. No volunteers means no money."

Volunteers also bring important knowledge into the mix, says Lough. Local staff from some volunteer abroad groups have told him: "We value the skills those volunteers are bringing into this community. We want them to come in."

And people have begun booking trips again.

But things are definitely different.

Kovac sees real promise in the virtual Habitat builds, because it may help people focus on the real reasons they're volunteering. "It's really for people who want to help because they want to help, not because they want to travel."

As for Morrison, she says she "feels lucky" that she was able to accomplish so much with the Sparkle Foundation last year even if she wasn't physically in Malawi. In fact, the group liked her work so much that they asked her back this summer as a paid intern working remotely.

In her bedroom in Norwich, she says that without the distraction of feeling "mesmerized" by an exotic location, she's been more honed in on her true purpose as a volunteer. And that's made her reevaluate the concept of overseas service.

"It's almost [discriminatory] that to make a real difference, you have to pay all this money to travel somewhere very far away," she says. "That's not how charity works."

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This article from guest  Francesca Rhodes asks if short-term volunteering overseas is good for the fight against poverty.

The industry for combining volunteering with travel (or ‘voluntourism’) is booming. But the sector is controversial, accused of irresponsibly promoting the idea that tourists can make a real difference to development by spending a few weeks of their time at a project.

According to the critics, this approach purely serves the needs and aspirations of the volunteer, and can have negative effects on the local communities that have to host and direct people who have little or no experience in the work they are carrying out.

One  volunteer company  doesn’t seem to shy away from this assumption, allowing potential volunteers to search through its projects with the questions, ‘Where do you want to go?’, ‘What do you want to do’ and ‘How long do you want to go for?’. If the volunteer is there to ‘make a difference’ to local communities then surely it should be ‘What can you do?’, ‘What are your skills’ and ‘Where are you needed?’.

Voluntouring isn’t cheap either. Volunteers usually shell out for flights, insurance, transfers, food, visas and vaccinations as well as the volunteer placement fee, which can be up to £400 a week.  The critics (including a character in our recent ‘ aid worker ’ video), argue that this money could be better spent if it was donated straight to the project, for example it would last a lot longer used as a salary for a qualified local worker to take the place of the volunteer.

But sometimes these criticisms can all feel a bit cynical. Surely there are lots of projects that would benefit from enthusiastic volunteers committing their time and energy, even if only for a short time? And isn’t there huge potential for utilising volunteers who return from their trip inspired, better informed about the world and looking to contribute more?

From my experience volunteering abroad, I would say that both sides of the argument have truth in them. The key to making sure your volunteering abroad is useful, efficient and positive for both parties is being honest about what skills you really have to offer as a volunteer, and careful research into where these skills might be used most effectively.

When I was 18 I volunteered as a teacher in the South Pacific country of Vanuatu. I hadn’t been much further east than Norwich before and had no experience teaching or working with young people. But, I had always dreamt of living on a tropical island - ever since seeing ‘The Beach’ aged 14 it had been a bit of an obsession. I believed that if placements were on offer there then these poor people must need me. Before I arrived I pictured myself surrounded by happy smiling children whose life chances had been drastically improved by my imparted wisdom and English language skills.

The reality was of course quite different. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my time living on an amazing tropical island steeped in history and culture, and I met some of the most welcoming and friendly people on the planet. I had an amazing year and my experience still influences me personally and professionally. What troubles me is that I could have experienced these things without taking up that particular teaching placement, and the arrogance in assuming children ‘needed’ to be taught by an unqualified and inexperienced westerner.

My school already had an English teacher, Lizzy, who was from the island and had stuck it out through high school and Uni to qualify – and she was really good at her job. When I arrived I took over her classes, and as I was completely new to teaching and had minimal (one week) training, it took me quite some time to get into it, and frankly I was never going to be as good as her. It would have been far better for me to have played an assistant role to Lizzy in her classes, or to have focused on helping students with their conversational English. However when I had seen teaching assistant placements advertised in the volunteer brochure, I turned them down in favour of full teaching as I thought I would make more of a difference that way.

It was partly the volunteer organisation’s fault, they should have had a better understanding of the education system in Vanuatu and the local community to know what their needs really were and weren’t. But it was also my fault for choosing a placement based on what I wanted to get out of it, not what I could honestly offer at the time.

I don’t have a problem with people wanting to see more of the world through voluntourism, it can provide links to communities which most tourists will never interact with, and these relationships can be mutually beneficial. I don’t have a problem with people shelling out thousands of pounds for placements which could be arranged locally for a fraction of the price, some people wouldn’t be confident doing so and would therefore never go. I don’t have a problem with qualified western teachers working in developing countries where there is a need (although this is a short term solution to a long term problem).

What I do have a problem with is volunteering projects which are not locally needed, not culturally sensitive and focus more on the aspirations of the volunteer than the community they are trying to help. There are some great ways to volunteer out there, but as volunteers we need to be honest and humble about what we can provide, and we need to challenge the sector to provide sustainable and effective ways to contribute our time.

So, if you’d like volunteer overseas for a short period, here are some sites and resources that I feel are approaching things the right way: -  Ecoteer  offers community based, low cost volunteering projects committed to environmental, economic and socio-cultural responsibility. 100% of the programme fee goes to the project and projects do not pay to list opportunities on the site.  -  2 Way development  is a specialist international volunteer agency, placing skilled volunteers with sustainable development projects.  -  Volunteer 4 Africa  is an independent, non profit organisation providing a database of low cost volunteering projects. -  Volunteer Latin America  is an information service connecting volunteers to non profit organizations seeking independent volunteers in Central and South America. -  Volunteer Thailand  provides instant access to organizations in Thailand actively seeking international volunteers.

If you’re interested in spending longer overseas and have strong skills to offer, then check out  VSO  in the UK,  AVI  in Australia or  Peace Corps  in the USA.

Demand Equity

Voluntourism - Good or Bad?

April 3, 2013

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Few Ideas for Action: A Short Essay on Voluntourism and Orphanage Volunteering

Voluntourism is a very special way of international volunteering that refers to normally short spans of service time that international volunteers decide to spend in developing countries normally during their holidays.

The report published by NGN sheds light on a particular area of voluntourism that sees international volunteers, often after having paid high fees, spending their holidays in orphanages or children homes mostly located in the most touristic spots Nepal offers.

The Better Volunteering Better Care Project , an international initiative looking at the phenomenon from a global point of view, shows that orphanage volunteering is not strong only in Nepal but also in other developing countries like Cambodia, Ghana and some countries from Latin America.

In Nepal not only is orphanage volunteering illegal but also volunteering with a tourist visa is illegal. To put it in a simple way international volunteering is outlawed unless you are associated with international sending organizations that have special agreements with the Government of Nepal.

The phenomenon in Nepal is massive with more than 800 children homes hosting approximately 15.000 children. The Central Child Welfare Board, the focal point agency for child related issues in Nepal is taking a close look at the phenomenon.

All orphanages/children homes are already categorized according to a set of benchmarks as per Standards for the Operation and Management of Residential Child Care Homes 2012 though the enforcement of the regulations remains often weak.

 In addition thanks to the advocacy work of organizations like NGN, Terres des Hommes and Unicef, a national policy on alternate care is being drafted.

Through the report, NGN takes a very pragmatic approach to orphanage volunteering by proposing a new understanding of what it defines as “ethical volunteering” as a way to ensure the implementation of acceptable standards in the way the volunteering experience is carried out. A win win experience that can be useful for the beneficiaries as well as the volunteers and not hamper but can enhance the wellbeing of the children.

Ethical volunteering is all about promoting new practices and working modalities that can ensure maximum benefits for the beneficiaries and local communities by regulating and overseeing the endeavors of short term international volunteers that must be able to mark a tangible difference.

NGN advocates for “a last resort option” when we talk about orphanage volunteering: if you can, avoid it otherwise you can do it by strictly following certain rules and principles all based on the best interests of the children.

Among other proposals put forward by NGN is also the idea of a paid volunteering registration scheme, an idea that a few years ago was also discussed among the members of a now defunct Volunteering Promotion Alliance.

In reality the Government of Nepal is not actually enforcing the rules prohibiting a foreigner entering into Nepal with a tourist visa to volunteer and it shouldn’t.

As proposed by NGN, a much more pragmatic approach would imply the regulation of the entire voluntourism sector by allowing local NGOs to mobilize international volunteers only through a new visa regime appositely created for international volunteers.

Let me think out loud about some ideas already proposed in the report that could help in regulating the entire sector:

On line Application

First local NGOs should apply to the Department of Immigration to obtain the authorization to mobilize international volunteers. The detailed CV of the incoming volunteers, including their duty descriptions should be provided. Inevitably a special desk should be open within the Department of Immigration to deal with voluntourism. In order to limit the numbers of applications, NGOs could be provided each year, based on their performances and reporting standards, with quotas within which they would be allowed to receive international volunteers.

At the same time it is impossible to expect that the Social Welfare Council, the body mandated to regulate international and national NGOs in the country, to exert control over international volunteers but nevertheless some options are also imaginable.

Special Reporting on Voluntourism

The NGOs receiving international volunteers, should, within their mandatory annual reporting to the SWC, comply with a new requirement mandating them to explain in details the work carried out by international volunteers. A particular focus should be laid on the capacity building aspect as each international volunteer coming to Nepal should prove to possess the skills and qualifications necessary to ensure an impact of the volunteering action carried out. The report could be also sent by the NGOs themselves to the Department of Immigration.

Background Check

In addition each volunteer should provide, before reaching Nepal, a ”No Objection Letter” or background verification from his home country authorities. These documentations would be also made available to the Department of Immigration before its final authorization.

According to the Report made by NGN, Thailand has come up with a similar application process and it seems to be working.

Certification first and mandatory Audit

Even better would be if the Department of Immigration would force all NGOs willing to engage with short term international volunteers to apply through an appositely created certification system.

While this certification should be made mandatory, it could be initially based on a self assessment, a house made checklist filled in by each organization. The Department of Immigration with the support of concerned bodies (this depends on the area of volunteering) would carry out random controls. With time the voluntary checklist should be used as a mandatory audit undertaken by each NGO involved with voluntourism.

Child focused volunteering

Orphanage volunteering should be transformed into a different form of support not more focused on the institution but more on family reintegration, including foster parenting. Obviously we cannot put the cart before the horse. The government with support of international donors should work towards drastically reducing the number of children homes legally operating in the country. Currently at the staggering number of 800, these children homes should be cut by half within five years.

Initially only the best ones (and there are actually quite a few) should be allowed to operate but then also these children homes should be strategically refocused on child integration with communities or foster parents.

It is true that some institutions have been doing wonders with their hosted kids but at the same time, it is high time for them to rethink about their roles.

I am not advocating for simply shutting them down but rather I believe that they can provide better service to the nation by reinventing themselves. By changing their nature, they can support the establishment of a national child policy system based on the family and externally supported by specialized agencies.

The best children homes could turn themselves in these specialized entities keeping in mind that some of them are already active in reunification and provide just supporting care.

They simply have to re-purpose their mandate and keep working with the children families by providing, for example, livelihoods opportunities for the children's relatives or by offering quality education and day care support. They can continue with their vision of improving the living conditions of the children but with a new approach.

Engaging the Private Sector

In the recent launch of the Report, many representatives of tour operators active in volunteerism attended.

For them voluntourism is simply and plainly business and we need to make sure that we find ways to help them turning it into an ethical one. For this reason it is very important to keep the tour operators and find ways to work with them to raise the standards of voluntourism.

Imagine a child protection focused project where an international volunteer, adequately vetted with a “NO Objection Letter ‘from his home country and equipped with adequate training and skills, starts living with the family of a child that till recently used to be staying with the nearby children home now turned into a specialized child center with day care only service for children from vulnerable backgrounds. International volunteer could either spend time with the family of the child teaching them livelihoods skills or doing counseling or could spend the day at the child center and then going back to sleep at the child’s place in the evening. This would be a kind of ethical home stay where the volunteer would contribute to the family’s economic wellbeing by paying for the hospitality received. This could be a real win win situation for the child, the family and the local economy and also for the volunteer that would be truly embedded in the local culture and grassroots reality.

These are just ideas that might help generate discussion on volunteerism.

To conclude a big thanks to Martin Punaks Country Director of NGN and Katie Feit for the great service done by writing this report.

Here the interview to Martin Punaks, Country Director of NGN and Main Author of the report:

http://sharing4good.org/content/orphanage-volunteering-interview-martin-punaks-country-director-next-generation-nepal

Here is my previous posting on voluntourism:

http://sharing4good.org/article/volun-tourism-children-homes-nepal-lets-find-middle-path

Tags: 

• international volunteerism
• child protection
• family reunification
• ethical volunteerism

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Pepy ride in japan, essay on voluntourism by fatima alsayegh.

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The following is an essay on "voluntourism" by Fatima AlSayegh for her English Media Writing class.  Fatima studies at Zayed University in Dubai and participated in a PEPY Tour with Dubai Cares this past April.  In her essay, Fatima explores the lessons and questions about volunteer tourism which she has gathered from her PEPY trip, Daniela Kon’s film "Changing the World on Vacation", and her own research and opinions. 

Thank you, Fatima, for being such an active part of the PEPY Team!  We hope you come out and join us in Cambodia again soon!

Voluntourism: Yay or Nay?

by Fatima AlSayegh, PEPY Tour participant

A typical vacation scenario might include you on some tourist-infested beach sipping on umbrella drinks whilst hoping to dear God that maybe this time, you’ll get a decent tan. Sound familiar? That, my friend, is called tourism. Why not live on the edge in as little as one week and dub yourself a voluntourist?

Voluntourists, a hybridization of “volunteerism” and “tourism” is what the word implies: volunteering whilst being a travelling tourist. Also, these two terms define two ever-growing industries. Over the past years, people have travelled miles and miles for the sole reason of volunteering to communities different than their own. Does the Peace Corps or Greenpeace come into mind? Now, people can volunteer while they are on vacation – thus the name “voluntourists”.

What better way to spend your vacation than as a volunteer as well as a tourist? Voluntourism holds many advantages. For one, a voluntourist can be rest assured that their time in the host country wouldn’t be squandered on 5-star hotels or chic fashion boutiques. On the contrary, voluntourists are given the opportunity to actually touch a life or two and make a tangible difference in someone’s future, a future that someone may never have had if said voluntourist didn’t come along. Another great pro is that someone with a busy schedule can actually hit two birds with one stone – volunteering while travelling instead of doing each at separate times. Let’s not forget that the core of voluntourism is to create that people-to-people connection. The voluntourist gets personally acquainted with the community and who he/she seeks to help, furthering a form of cultural exchange that the Peace Corps and UN Volunteer programs vouch for.

Voluntourism has its other face. Playing the role of Mother Theresa for a short period of time in third-world countries can yield positive results – both emotional and spiritual – to the helper, but it also yields negative results – both emotional and spiritual – on the helped. Voluntourism is not something to be taken lightly, and voluntourism companies and NGOs should always weigh the pros to the cons of what they seek to fulfill. The beauty of voluntourism is that anyone can apply and become a voluntourist. The beast, however, is that anyone can apply, which means that unskilled people who are just empowered with the will to volunteer and sightsee are the target audience. Not certified doctors or experts in the field – anyone. Then the question of “what can you possibly achieve in as little as one week?” comes up. Then there’s the issue that voluntourism just makes problems away from home much more appealing to support than those close to home. It takes a lot of planning and organizing to make voluntourism a success, and foregoing such measures can become catastrophic to the local community.

An insightful and personal peak into the core of voluntourism is captured in the documentary “Changing the World on Vacation” by film-maker Daniela Kon. This documentary follows volunteers from the US and Cambodian-registered NGO, PEPY, during their trips across Cambodia. Personal insights and mistakes made on PEPY’s part run throughout the documentary. 

PEPY’s founder, Daniela Papi, has found this documentary as an eye-opener to what the NGO has been promoting, when it essentially had all the best intentions at heart. Examples include not enforcing strict clothing regulations (it is disrespectful in Cambodian culture to expose your shoulders while visiting its temples, a mistake tour participants made during one of the trips), tailoring the trips based around the volunteers’ ideas of education, not the local population’s ideas of education, and when Papi mentioned that “Cambodia has a limitless supply of fish.” I don’t think so.

However, that was all back during PEPY’s first days as a young NGO. Now after 4 years of operation, PEPY has tailored its trips around responsible tourism and responsible giving in which voluntourists ultimately help out the local community whether it be dining in a locally-owned restaurant or not giving in to the hordes of child beggars ravaging the streets of Cambodian tourist destinations (such as the Angkor temples) and preying primarily on foreign tourists as their source of income. Basically, what separates PEPY from your typical tourism agency is that PEPY actually makes sure it gives back to the local community in the form of funding development projects rather than take from the local community which is what tourists tend to unconsciously do.

The documentary also highlights the everyday struggle of PEPY when it comes to maintaining its core belief of responsible giving, even with the problematic reputation some charities may have.

Voluntourism, as appealing as it may sound to actually change the world while you are on vacation, is a relatively new industry, and as such, is affected by many controversies that try to weigh its pros to its cons – is it beneficial to the helped or to the (temporary) helper? Despite such controversies, voluntourism is an ever-expanding industry, with do-good companies springing up within this field promising voluntourists a whole new door to travelling  and volunteering. All that can be said is that voluntourism is much more beneficial to both ends when the voluntourist does the right and responsible decision in the first place by picking the most socially responsible NGO right from the start, before any bags are packed.

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