Author Archives: jcravens

About jcravens

Jayne Cravens is an internationally-recognized trainer, researcher and consultant. Her work is focused on communications, volunteer involvement, community engagement, and management for nonprofits, NGOs, and government initiatives. She is a pioneer regarding the research, promotion and practice of virtual volunteering, including virtual teams, microvolunteering and crowdsourcing, and she is a veteran manager of various local and international initiatives. Jayne became active online in 1993, and she created one of the first web sites focused on helping to build the capacity of nonprofits to use the Internet. She has been interviewed for and quoted in articles in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press, as well as for reports by CNN, Deutsche Well, the BBC, and various local radio stations, TV stations and blogs. Resources from her web site, coyotecommunications.com, are frequently cited in reports and articles by a variety of organizations, online and in-print. Women's empowerment and women's full access to employment and education options remains a cross-cutting theme in all of her work. Jayne received her BA in Journalism from Western Kentucky University and her Master's degree in Development Management from Open University in the U.K. A native of Kentucky, she has worked for the United Nations, lived in Germany and Afghanistan, and visited more than 30 countries, many of them by motorcycle. She is currently based near Portland, Oregon in the USA.

Virtual Volunteering Wiki has moved

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The Virtual Volunteering Wiki was developed in association with The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, a book available from Energize, Inc.

The purpose of this wiki is to share resources regarding virtual volunteering beyond what is available in the guidebook. The wiki is maintained by Jayne Cravens and Susan Ellis, the authors of the guidebook.

The wiki was launched originally in 2013 at http://virtualvolunteering.wikispaces.com, a year before the book was published, and it has been updated regularly since then. Unfortunately, as of September 2018, Wikispaces will be discontinued by its parent company. So the material has been relocated here, at www.coyotecommunications.com/vvwiki/.

Although it will no longer be, officially, a wiki – it will no longer allow all of the organizers to directly edit the pages – it will maintain its neutral tone, be updated regularly and will welcome contributions from anyone who has information about virtual volunteering – though, since I have no funding for this, I have to give my funded projects priority over updating it, so your patience is appreciated.

This wiki is still being refined at its new home – sorry for any issues with broken links. I hope these can all be resolved by August.

Some of the most popular pages on the Virtual Volunteering Wiki:

My wakeup call regarding risks in volunteering programs

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When I first started promoting the work of the Virtual Volunteering Project back in 1997, the question asked most frequently was, “How do you keep people safe from online volunteers who might be predators?”

I took those safety concerns to heart and, for months, poured over information from the FBI and from the Center for Missing and Exploited Children at the time. I learned all I could about who harms other people, particularly children, and what situations put children at most harm. And I was stunned at what I learned: the vast majority of missing children who have been taken by someone were taken by a non-custodial parent, not a stranger. And that the vast majority of people that harm children are family members or someone known and trusted by the family.

I also researched identify theft – and was stunned to discover how often this theft is perpetrated by family members or someone else living in the house where the victim lives: using the victim’s credit card, opening credit accounts, open new bank accounts, getting loans, withdrawing funds from the victim’s bank account, using the victim’s health and/or dental insurance for their own use, claiming the victim’s government benefits as their own and filing false tax returns or claiming the victim’s tax refunds.

I revisit these subjects regularly, and in more than 20 years, the facts haven’t changed about where the dangers regarding abuse and identity theft come from. When I reference these facts regarding safety in a training, it sometimes draws gasps from the audience. I remind workshop attendees that Larry Nassar was well known to his victims, their parents and coaches and trusted by many. So was Jerry Sandusky. So are many of the clergymen facing charges related to child sexual abuse. And I ask: what policies do YOU have that would prevent this at your organization, by a volunteer, client or staff member you know and trust but aren’t observing every second during his or her service? Does your organization have a speak up culture or a culture of avoidance?

I also remind them that Big Brothers / Big Sisters brings adults and children together and that these adults and children interact far from the eyes of any staff members or family – and the organization has a stellar safety record. How does BBBS do such an incredible job regarding safety? Safety is embedded in every part of their organizational culture. They don’t just do a criminal background check: they interview candidates for volunteering, they observe them, they reference check them, they train them, they have intensive and repeated interactions with them, and they train client families about safety as well. Participants are continually reminded of safety guidelines and warning signs. They also have strict guidelines about situations mentors and children are, and are not, allowed to be in, like any situation where there would be a changing of clothes in front of each other or others, such as in a gym locker room – and participants are continually reminded of these guidelines.

None of this is to say that protecting volunteers and clients from strangers isn’t important, or that doing activities online doesn’t incur risks. But it’s a sobering reality that people, including children, are harmed by people they know and trust far more than strangers. If your risk management for volunteers or clients focuses only on strangers, you are cultivating an environment where very bad things can happen.

And for the record: I’ve been studying virtual volunteering since 1996, and still have no account of an online volunteer causing harm to an organization. If it hasn’t happened, it WILL happen, because there is no way to interact with humans, online or face-to-face, and absolutely prevent, 100%, that anything bad will happen as a results.

For more information:

This excellent article by David Finkelhor, the director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire

The myth of stranger danger by Heather Ryan

The Center for Identity Management and Information Protection, housed at Utica College.

August 2019 update:

In an article in Ms Magazine, Amanda Ruzicka of the Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said:

Research has shown that adolescents commit up to half of all child sexual abuse incidents against younger children, and that the onset of this behavior peaks at age 14.

Let that fact sink in. And consider how many nonprofits bring adolescents together with younger children, as clients or as volunteers, and don’t have this fact in mind. It does not ALL mean that these nonprofits shouldn’t bring adolescents together with younger children but, rather, that appropriate precautions need to be taken regarding adolescents being along together, let alone with children. And it’s another example of how we focus so much on stranger danger – but not on the much more common risk. And please note that the Moore Center has an excellent program to help address this risk, summarized below from the same article the same article in Ms Magazine:

We also know that most times adolescents engage in harmful sexual behaviors with younger children because of factors like the absence of adult supervision, or a lack of knowledge about appropriate sexual behaviors and how their actions can impact themselves and others—not because they are bad kids. Our Responsible Behavior with Younger Children (RBYC) program aims to provide sixth and seventh grade students with the knowledge, tools and skills they need to model healthy behaviors with younger children and their peers. RBYC focuses on what behaviors are harmful and constitute sexual harassment or child sexual abuse, the consequences of those behaviors, as well as why these behaviors are harmful and how to prevent them. Students learn about real-life scenarios when harmful sexual behaviors could take place, how to take the perspective of a younger child and how respond in a healthy and empathetic way. Other sessions highlight the developmental differences between adolescents and younger children, healthy behaviors with younger children and peers and how to be a good bystander or upstander… we focus on preventing child sexual abuse in a manner that takes the responsibility off of children to protect themselves, and instead focuses on preventing perpetration.

And remember that the Boy Scouts of America kept a file of more than 7,800 Boy Scout members that had committed sexual crimes against boys in their program – none of those predators were unknown to their victims and were often well known to the parents of their victims – no strangers. The growing number of lawsuits allege that Boy Scouts staff and volunteers were aware that the structure of the institution was a convenient landing spot for child predators and did nothing to rework the organization or protect its charges.

Also see:

List of my books, papers, citations in other publications

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I have no idea why I haven’t done this before: I’ve made a list of my own publications (many available for purchase, as well as books, white papers, academic papers, etc. that quote me or cite my work, going back to 1999.

vvbooklittleMy most well-known traditional publication is The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. This book, which I co-wrote with Susan J. Ellis, is our attempt to document all of the best practices for using the Internet to support and involve volunteers from the more than three decades that this has been happening. Whether the volunteers are working in groups onsite, in traditional face-to-face roles, in remote locations, or any other way, anyone working with volunteers will find The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook helpful. The book is available both in traditional print form and in a digital version.

 

Volunteers should be talking about their experience online

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graphic by Jayne Cravens representing volunteersYour program’s volunteers talk online about their experiences with your organization.

YES, THEY DO!

Did you feel that chill in the air? It was generated by managers of volunteers at nonprofits, government agencies, schools and more going cold at the realization that there may be negative comments by volunteers on Facebook and Twitter about their frustrations with the organization, about program incompetence, and more. It’s a chill I always feel when I do workshops and I bring up the topic of volunteers and social media. And I admit, I am always amused by the reaction.

I love to read what volunteers write unofficially about their volunteering work. I don’t mean official blogs by volunteers done under the auspices of the organization (though I do often enjoy those as well); I mean the writing that the volunteer does on his or her own blog space or on social media, the posts where he or she isn’t doing a PR piece for the organization with nothing but glowy, happy thoughts, and maybe a vague, “It was challenging, but I learned a lot” comment.

I also go on Twitter sometimes and do searches for these phrases:

  • hate volunteering
  • bored volunteer
  • volunteer PDX
  • volunteer Portland Oregon

I find some rather interesting things when I do searches for those phrases. Here are some examples from looking for hate volunteering on Twitter:

Interesting stuff!

So, what if you tried it with the name of your organization, or your city, on Twitter or Facebook, or just Google or Bing in general?

How else do you know what is being said about your organization or yourself in the public spaces online — on blogs, in captions on Flickr photos, in newspaper articles, and in public online discussion groups?

My favorite tool for tracking what’s being said about an organization I’m working with, or even just me, is GoogleAlerts. This free service automatically notifies you if there is any new content online in a public space — including traditional print media that publishes their stories online — that mentions whatever phrase or phrases you want to track. It won’t tell you about email conversations, as those are private, or about postings on private online spaces (a private online discussion group, for instance, or someone’s Facebook profile that has all of its privacy settings on — so long as Facebook keeps allowing such privacy settings, which it may not always do).

You can use GoogleAlerts or similar tools to track:

  • Your name
  • Your organization’s name
  • Your executive director’s name
  • Another organization (your competition, a partner, an organization you aspire to be like, etc.)
  • A particular subject matter
  • Etc.

Start with two GoogleAlerts at first — one of just your name, and one of your organization’s name. Putting a name in quotes is best, so that you will get only exact matches (I don’t want every newspaper story that mentions Jayne and also Cravens, but specifically, Jayne Cravens, and that won’t happen unless I put my entire name in quotes, like this: “Jayne Cravens”). You will then receive an email when something is published online with your alert name, with a link to the mention. You can set the alerts to come as the mentions happen (for instance, when the blog is posted that mentions your name), in a daily summary, or in a weekly summary.

If you find anything being said about volunteering at your organization by doing these searches, you probably won’t find negative things – you are much more likely to find positive things, even heart-warming things. Whether negative or positive, remember that you don’t have a right to tell volunteers to not share such opinions, so long as they are staying within your organization’s confidentiality and security policies.

You can choose how to react to finding feedback about your organization online. If it’s negative, is it also true? Is the comment bringing up a management or training problem that actually needs to be addressed? If the comment is positive, could it be turned into something more official for your organization, like an official blog for your organization, or a testimonial to put in a newsletter or on your web site?

As for me, when I go searching for volunteer voices online, I love it when I find blogs where I hear about the fears, the frustrations and the mistakes by volunteers, when I hear about what they’ve learned and what they lack and what they wish was different. I also love the nitty gritty — not just, “I arrived at the site at 3” but “I had to bribe three officials to get into the work site.”

I go looking for these unofficial blogs from time-to-time. Here are two I found:

Here’s one I found via the volunteer forum on Reddit: a woman in Maryland is trying to volunteer once-a-week for a full year at a “one-time” volunteer event, every week from September 10, 2017 to September 9, 2018. She has set rules for herself: she can’t repeat benefitting organizations even if the event is different from one she’s volunteered for before, she can’t take time off specifically to volunteer, and she cannot mention this project in an attempt to be guaranteed a volunteer position at an event. She’s also a volunteer manager at a Meals on Wheels – imagine what she’s learning re: volunteer management! Her posts are super positive – at least the 10 or so I read. I wonder if any of the organization’s she’s helping know about these wonderful blogs.

I would love to find more of these types of independent blogs written by volunteers, not under the official auspices of the organization they are helping. I would love it if more volunteers produced these types of blogs: they are honest voices we need to hear.

What I would also love to see is more volunteers talking about their experiences with specific nonprofits on Yelp, probably the most popular web site for customer reviews of businesses. I would especially love to hear from volunteers who pay companies to volunteer abroad, sharing about their experience via Yelp. Finding organizations you can pay in order to participate in a short-term, feel good volunteering experience abroad is easy; finding out if they are credible is much harder. This situation will improve only if people who have paid to volunteer review the organizations they worked with in a public forum like Yelp, or on a blog of their own (More on volunteering abroad).

Here is an official blog by a volunteer, Jasmin Blessing, a UN Volunteer with UN Women in Ecuador. It is a really nice example of what effective volunteering abroad looks like. Surely YOU have a volunteer among your ranks that could offer their insights about working with your organization?

Also see:

Still Trying to Volunteer, Still Frustrated

How to Handle Online Criticism

Grumpy Jayne

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I’m grumpy.

I need a vacation.

What’s making me grumpy these days?

Here’s a partial list:

Conferences that want to charge presenters to attend. Never mind that the presenters are a significant reason why most people attend the conference.

Corporations and for-profit businesses that want advice from me by email or phone about a new product they want to launch – but they don’t want to pay me.

Digital inclusion efforts that don’t talk about web and app accessibility.

Any inclusion efforts that don’t talk about web and app accessibility.

Digital divide initiatives that don’t talk about web and app accessibility.

Popularity contests disguised as “crowdsourcing.” You know: crowdsource who should get a special volunteering award! Such an award isn’t based on merit – it’s based on how well someone or an organization can market itself.

Crowdsourcing efforts actually being about harvesting email addresses / subscribers for something. Example: crowdsource answers to questions from nonprofits on our platform! But register first! (and be added to our newsletter where we will endlessly pitch our products to you) 

Organizations, especially schools, complaining that they don’t have enough volunteers, but then making it impossible to find information about how to volunteer, and what opportunities are available on their web site, etc.

Firefighters complaining that they don’t have enough volunteers, but having a lousy web site regarding volunteer information, refusing to use social media beyond “We posted to Facebook once last year!”, refusing to recruit in any ways that are different than “this is how we’ve always done it,” and targeting their recruitment measures to only those who might want to become career firefighters (volunteering is only a stepping stone).

People who say, upon hearing that their website isn’t accessible for people with disabilities, “Well, I don’t think we have that many people with disabilities trying to access our web site.”

Corporations and government officials who whine about nonprofits not being innovative or risk taking, but then balk at funding overhead costs, including staff training, computer technology, Internet access, etc.

People who never replied to my requests during a process I’m involved with regarding ways to improve or my questions on where to find something but then, when the event or campaign is over, are suddenly are brimming with ideas of how things should have been done.

People who don’t answer my questions and then are stunned when I don’t do work that matches their expectations.

People who post endlessly on Facebook about injustices or various social causes but never come to city council meetings, or citizens’ advisory committees, never attend public meetings to talk to police officers one-on-one, don’t attend candidate debates or town halls by elected officials, don’t vote, etc.

Consultants who make all sorts of suggestions about what an agency should be doing, but have never employed those suggestions first hand themselves. (“Here’s how you should be recruiting volunteers! Oh, no, I’ve never employed these methods myself… I don’t work with volunteers…”)

Consultants that promote themselves as social media experts and have just a few followers on Twitter.

Managers who believe lack of complaints means things are going really well (rather than, perhaps, complaints aren’t being heard).

Organizations that say they need volunteers but turn people away who try – including me.

Can’t get enough? Here are other blogs of frustration:

Innovation without replication is a waste of time.

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Excerpt from a terrific blog in the Stanford Social Innovation Review by Kevin Starr, director of the Mulago Foundation and the Rainer Arnhold Fellows Program.

I hate to be the skunk at the party, but look: The most urgent challenge in the social sector is not innovation, but replication. No idea will drive big impact at scale unless organizations—a lot of them—replicate it. And there are plenty of high-impact ideas awaiting high-quality replication…

Here’s the thing, though: High-fidelity replication is hard… You must be committed to and obsessive about the details.

Here’s an example of a replicator putting in what it takes: Living Goods is a well-known social venture that fields an Avon Lady-like network of dynamic village community health promoters. These promotors sell health products (including malaria and pneumonia treatments) door-to-door, doing health education and making clinic referrals all the while. The Living Goods model went through many iterations, working through core issues like supply chain logistical systems and the right basket of goods. It turned out that the most important they learned was how to hire and train great salespeople as health promoters…

Living Goods has grown to a respectable size, with 3,538 health promotors in Uganda and Kenya. However, for the model to achieve impact at real scale, others will have to join as replicators… The Living Goods model is complicated. Its systems, talent, and overall management are world class. If you want to get the same results, you need to be serious about it. You need to invest what it takes to do it right.

The entire blog by Kevin Starr is worth your time. And when a funder asks you why you can’t “just do what they are doing at such-and-such agency”, use this blog to help show why replication has real costs – real money, real time, real resources.

Also see:

What should be on a political web site

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I’m a stickler for nonprofit organizations being as transparent as possible, well beyond what is required by law, regarding their financing, spending and staffing. As mission-based organizations, with missions that are supposed to benefit people and/or our environment, being accountable not only to donors but to all the public at large is crucial in showing credibility and ethics. Many in the for-profit/corporate and political sphere are threatened by the work of such organizations – nonprofits, NGOs, community-based organizations, etc. – and they can use an organization’s perceived lack of transparency about certain information to feed the public’s distrust of such organizations. Nonprofits can head this office by sharing as much info as possible on their web site about who they are and what they do.

I think a nonprofit, NGO, etc. should have on its web site:

  • a list of its board of directors
  • a list of its staff, at least senior staff, and their credentials
  • a statement of when the organization was founded and why
  • a list of key activities and accomplishments since the organization was founded
  • a statement regarding how much money it raised or earned in the last fiscal year and how much it spent, and at least a general idea on what it spent that money on

There have been nonprofits that I have seriously thought about giving a donation to, but when I go to their web site, they don’t have this basic info, so I don’t donate. I wonder how many other donations these nonprofits have missed out on because of this lack of info? There’s even more I think should be on a nonprofit’s web site, like complete information about volunteering, but that’s another blog.

I apply this rule about mandatory information that must be on a web site to political organizations and political candidates I’m interested in as well. No matter how passionately I feel in support of a candidate or a viewpoint, I want to know who is running things and how the money will be spent, even a general idea. You want me to donate to so-and-so so they can win an election? What are you going to spend the money on? In particular, how much will go to paying for TV time, radio time, flyers, web site development, etc., and how much is going to be paid to consultants for their ideas? What percentage of your staffing is by paid consultants and what percentage is by unpaid volunteers? And if you are a political organization, when were you founded, who is staffing the organization, and how did you pick the candidates you have suggested in your voter guide?

Another tip for political organizations: when someone comes to my door and says they are from such-and-such organization, and they want me to sign a petition about judicial reform or some new law or whatever, I am more likely to listen to that person if he or she says, “I am a volunteer with so-and-so.” Knowing someone is a volunteer, not a paid political person, gives whatever that person says much more weight with me. A volunteer is giving up precious time, often on a weekend, to reach out to me about a person or a cause – that’s how passionate that person feels about that candidate or ballot measure or whatever. And that carries a huge amount of weight with me. A paid person is the same as an ad on TV, and I just shrug, take the info and usually cut them off – I’d prefer to look up the candidate or issue myself in my own time.

Also see:

If I can’t find what I’m looking for on your web site, who else can’t?

Use Your Web Site to Show Your Accountability and To Teach Others About the Nonprofit / NGO / Charity Sector!

REQUIRED Volunteer Information on Your Web Site

Still trying to volunteer, still frustrated

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Back in February 2012, I wrote a blog called I’m a Frustrated Volunteer. It was about how often people try to volunteer but run up into so many roadblocks: incomplete, hard-to-understand information on the organization’s web site, lack of followup by the organization after the person expresses interest, no clear direction or support when they are trying to complete a volunteering task, etc. So often, when organizations, especially schools, tell me they can’t find volunteers, the problem is, in fact, they are turning potential volunteers away per the aforementioned challenges.

In that blog, I admitted that the frustrated volunteer wannabe I was describing was, in fact, ME, based on my experiences trying to volunteer oh-so many times since September 2009, when I moved back to the USA – Oregon, specifically. I noted that the upside with all this frustration was that my own attempts to volunteer had made me a better consultant and better manager regarding volunteer engagement, and the experience had generated a lot of new resources on my web site. Those experiences as a frustrated volunteer also influenced my writing of The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook.

It’s six years after that blog. Am I still a frustrated volunteer?

Yes. Yes, I am.

Here are some experiences I’ve had in trying to volunteer over the last few years:

  • I wanted to volunteer at the local high school. I was ready to help with their drama club, their speech team, or any other club or class where my expertise might help the students. The home page for the school doesn’t even have the word volunteer on it. Once you find the page for potential volunteers, it has just three paragraphs: no information about what volunteers do, the minimum amount of commitment required, etc. The lead statement is “Our volunteers contribute more than $1.6 million worth of help each year — the equivalent of about 12 extra hours of adult time for every student in the district.” Yes, that’s right – volunteers are great because it means the school doesn’t have to hire people to do that work! Next…
  • I wanted to explore volunteering with a local public service agency that supposedly involves volunteers in auxiliary support roles for staff engaged in a very intense activity. The web site has no info about this auxiliary, though I’m sure it exists. I wrote the person who is in charge of agency’s more labor-intensive, time-intensive volunteering. He wrote back and said he had some PDFs he could share with me about the program – but offered no summary of what the program was about, the application process, etc., and certainly no encouragement – I felt like I was bothering him. And why isn’t this information on the web site? He never said why. Next…
  • I’ve wanted to volunteer to help girls go camping or to become leaders or to use tech both safely and to explore careers, but Girl Scouts doesn’t do those kinds of activities where I live, and another group that I thought did those things never got back to me after my TWO applications to volunteer. Next…
  • I was interested in volunteering at a nearby jail to help people regarding résumé writing, finding volunteering after incarceration in order to build community ties and skills, interviewing skills, etc. But when I tried, I was told a religious-based organization was in charge of all of these volunteering activities, and I would need to contact that religious-based organization. I am not of that religion – in fact, I am not religious at all, and I felt like I wouldn’t be welcomed because I’m not religious and wouldn’t be helping from a faith-based motivation. I submitted my application, but I never heard anything back from the church in charge of the program. Next…

What volunteering has worked out for me?

  • There’s a woman in the town where I live who is trying to start a nonprofit, and I’ve been able to help her with by-laws, writing a mission statement and other basic requirements.
  • I still help Bpeace on occasion as an online volunteer. And, BTW, Bpeace is awesome – check them out.
  • I signed up online to help at a forum for candidates running for a particular office. I ended up being the greeter at the sign-in table, something that I actually really enjoy. I wasn’t given much guidance – good thing I’ve worked a LOT of registration tables over the years. But it was over in just three hours. No more candidate forums until the Fall, before the November election.
  • I’m still volunteering online with TechSoup, contributing information to their community forum.
  • I’m serving on a citizens’ committee for public safety in the town where I live; after a year, the committee has come up with exactly zero recommendations to police and fire or the city council regarding safety in our town, and other committee members have balked at my ideas regarding pedestrian and bicyclist safety. Still, she persisted…

Online volunteering is super easy to find, as always, and I love it. But I continue to be frustrated in my attempts to be an onsite volunteer in activities that I feel a personal passion about. And I know that this is a chronic problem. Wouldn’t it be great if, instead of campaigns to get people to volunteer, we had funding and training for nonprofits, public sector agencies and schools about how to appropriately on-board and engage volunteers?

So, what volunteers has your initiative been turning away?

More on this subject:

 

Yes, I really did read that report you wrote

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logoI worked in Afghanistan back in 2007, and I stay in contact with some of my Afghan colleagues there, including a member of my communications staff from back in the day. As I’ve written about before, I’ve been mentoring her online since I left, regarding her university studies, her career pursuits and her work.

For the past few years, she’s worked for a government initiative regarding water and sanitation. Communications regarding WatSan was brand new to me, and to her, so we both had to work to get up-to-speed on best practices, particularly regarding working in low-infrastructure communities, rural communities, low-literacy communities, and with women. How have we gotten ourselves up-to-speed on this particular type of public health communications? By finding and reading online reports by various United Nations agencies and various non-governmental organizations (NGOs). It’s been extraordinarily easy to find relevant, detailed reports on how water and sanitation practices have been communicated in every scenario imaginable and very honest reports about what’s worked and what hasn’t.

We’re still not experts. But the reality in humanitarian work is that, very often, you are suddenly asked to do something that’s at least a bit outside your experience, and you may have just a few weeks, or a few days, or even a few hours, to get the knowledge you need to proceed. That so many humanitarian workers have shared their work online has been critical to me doing my job over the years, and it’s proving invaluable to my colleague in Afghanistan as well.

So, thank you, all you communications staff at various UN, USAID, DFID, and NGO-supported initiatives all over the world, for detailing what worked and what didn’t in whatever project you worked on, and sharing that online. You may think you no one is reading your reports. But we are.

Also see:

Volunteers themselves speaking out about voluntourism

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There are few things more cringeworthy than watching 20 British schoolgirls trying to build a well under the scalding Nepalese heat. This is what I imagine a group of local men were thinking as they politely stood back while we puzzled our way through this contraption. The orphans peered through the windows, somewhat accustomed to this strange set-up. An unnecessary number of hours later, a ceremony took place thanking us for our hard work. We had singlehandedly brought clean water to this poor, desperate orphanage. We could fly home better people.

This scathing comment is from an editorial called DUCK expeditions are a load of quack published in the Palatinate, the official student newspaper of Durham University in the UK. The blog is an honest account of voluntourism by someone who, as a young teen, went abroad, thinking she her good heart but complete lack of expertise was what a poor community abroad needed and wanted. I applaud her for coming forward when she realized what her voluntourism experience had really been, in terms of helping and impact abroad.

In addition, via link on Reddit, I found a blog from 2015, by a young woman in Germany whose hope for a voluntourism experience to help turtles actually became torture for them:

“The ‘turtle conservation program’ was shut down after the police came (there is a law in Fiji to protect turtles as they are threatened by extinction). A girl made a… ehh… Let’s say critical Facebook post. I think ‘inhuman’ and ‘animal torture’ were some of the words she used… I’m just glad that I got my money back without any problem because I know about 7 people who had to go to court to get some of their money back because the agencies made a lot of great promises without keeping them. What they offer is not really volunteer work, here they call it voluntourism. A lot of money which doesn’t actually help anybody but just finances the international agencies. I got quite disillusioned about volunteering here. I left the volunteer house as soon as possible and went to a resort. The turtles were set free, but they are probably dead because they have been in the tank for too long and weren’t able to survive anymore. I’m so sorry for them.”

I did reach out to the author and, indeed, she exists and this was her experience. In an email to me last month, she noted:

I must say that I really regret not following through on that whole thing after I got the full amount back. I should have addressed that magazine to publish the whole story or the topic, or at least have given public critics, but I was 18, alone in Fiji and everything was very exciting… I was just too distracted with all that comes with starting university. So I am happy to hear that somebody actually does address that topic…

I appreciate these young people speaking out – it’s NOT easy. These are people who really did want to do the right thing, and while their attempt at voluntourism ended up being wasteful or even destructive, their voice now IS doing the right thing, and I applaud them.

But it’s not just people who paid to volunteer who are speaking out – it’s also people who were exploited:

The support of orphanages has created a thriving industry in which children are separated from their families and subjected to terrible abuse and neglect, as I was — being used as a commodity to generate funding… Having these adults coming in and out of our lives felt like we were continuously being abandoned.

This statement is from Sinet Chan, who grew up in a Cambodian orphanage and has pleaded with Australians not to donate to or volunteer at orphanages. Her quote is from this article about the push in Australia to make ‘orphanage tourism’ illegal.

I’m not letting up on this issue. The ability to pay and having a good heart should NOT qualify someone to hold orphans and take selfies in Africa, or wash elephants, or hand out food to refugees. If you want to help abroad, then get involved locally; you shouldn’t feel that you have the expertise to do something abroad – work with at-risk youth, help animals, help refugees, etc. – unless you have experience doing it locally, in your own country, preferably in your own community.

There is such a thing as effective short-term international volunteering. And it is NOT impossible to break into humanitarian work. And caring about people and animals abroad is a great quality to have. But taking action abroad needs to come from a place from respect and knowledge.

July 8, 2018 update: My consulting colleague and all-around amazing human Dr. Erin Barnhardt wrote about her own experience as a pay-to-volunteer-abroad experience in her 2012 PhD thesis, Engaging Global Service: Organizational Motivations for and Perceived Benefits of Hosting International Volunteers. She notes in the introduction to her research:

While my experience in Jordan was on the whole overwhelmingly positive, I was surprised and somewhat disappointed to discover that I was in fact a largely ineffective volunteer. I knew that staying for only two weeks meant that my contributions would be severely limited and that my lack of Arabic language skills would further hamper my impact, but I’d assumed that coming in with a professional expertise meant that I could make some kind of lasting contribution during my very short tenure. What I discovered though was, despite having gone through a reputable volunteer-sending organization to an organization that regularly hosted international volunteers, the infrastructure to put me to work was minimal and somewhat ad hoc. I came to the Jordanian NGO with a genuine interest in helping out, only to discover that there was in fact little for me to do.

I so appreciate Erin’s honesty – and the honesty of all people who have paid-to-volunteer abroad and are now speaking out about it.

July 16, 2018 update: When volun-tourism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be’ – ‘It was pretty much a zoo’: The conditions came to light by Amanda Rowland, 21, an upset and unhappy volunteer who had paid over $3000 to visit the centre in in Malaysia for a month in January. Amanda had been sold the trip as a chance to work at a temporary holding facility for orangutans rescued from illegal possession.

May 31, 2019: Chase and JP Morgan has a commercial to encourage financial planning that promotes volunteerism with wildlife: a happy couple gushes about their volunteer trip abroad scrubbing elephants’ feet and further gush how they would like to make that trip every year from now on, and their financial advisor is happy to oblige. So disappointing to see these two companies promote such a highly unethical and harmful practice!

My other blogs on this subject: