Tag Archives: volunteering

can volunteer engagement cultivate innovation?

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Can volunteer engagement cultivate innovation within an organization where volunteers serve? And what conditions are necessary for such innovation by volunteers to happen? This paper explores that question: Beyond Service Production: Volunteering for Social Innovation by Arjen de Wit of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Wouter Mensink of The Netherlands Institute for Social Research, The Hague, The Netherlands, Torbjörn Einarsson of Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden, and René Bekkers of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

It was first published online on October 12, 2017 and was published on paper in the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly by ARNOVA.

Abstract:

Building on theories from different fields, we discuss the roles that volunteers can play in the generation, implementation, and diffusion of social innovations. We present a study relying on 26 interviews with volunteer managers, other professionals, volunteers, and one former volunteer in 17 (branches of) third sector organizations in eight European countries. We identify organizational factors that help and hinder volunteer contributions to social innovation… This rich, explorative study makes it a fruitful start for further research on the relationship between volunteering and social innovation.

In short, their research question was: Which organizational factors help and hinder volunteers to contribute to social innovations in third sector organizations?

You can download the paper for free.

I found the paper because I’m quoted in it. And if you are a manager of volunteers, this is one of those rare academic papers on volunteerism that is actually worth your time to read (sorry, academics, but so often, your papers aren’t what practioners need).

By social innovation, the paper’s authors mean new solutions – products, markets, services, methods, models, processes – that lead to new or improved capabilities and better use of assets and resources by a nonprofit, NGO or other volunteer hosting organization that address its mission and serve its cause, directly. I define social innovation as something that is transformative for the organization and those it serves. Certainly volunteers that introduced mission-based organizations to the Internet were social innovators. Volunteers connecting an organization to new communities and people very different from those the nonprofit usually works with can be seen as social innovators as well.

Here are “a few illustrative examples” the paper identifies as social innovations introduced to nonprofits by volunteers:

a telephone service in a nonnative language (Swedish Red Cross), a School of Civic Initiative where people are educated to make them more active in public life (Hnutí Duha, Czech Republic), first aid education for partially sighted and blind people (German Red Cross), a bicycle campaign (Greenpeace Denmark), and a shelter for illegal male immigrants (Salvation Army Netherlands).

Examples of innovations occurring on a larger scale and introducing system-level changes that the paper cites are:

the lobby for new government policies (Czech branch of the Salvation Army) and a network to connect entrepreneurs in the field of environment with investors, publish their innovative work, and promote a financing network (Fundación Biodiversidad, Spain).

The paper delivers on identifying organizational factors that help and hinder volunteer contributions to social innovation. From the paper’s conclusion:

Organizational factors that may enhance volunteer contributions to social innovations include a decentralized organizational structure, the “scaling up” of ideas, providing training and giving volunteers a sense of ownership. Factors that may hinder volunteer contributions to innovations include a lack of resources and a reluctant attitude within the organization, for example, when a new project does not fit within the organization’s strategy. By identifying and exploring these mechanisms, this article adds insights on a new perspective for third sector research and offers useful tools for volunteer managers to improve the innovative capacity of their organization.

Terrific stuff. Kudos to the authors. This paper is worth your time.

Also see:

research on why NGOs recruit international volunteers

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I am a frequent blogger about voluntourism – mostly to say, “Don’t do it – don’t pay to volunteer for two-weeks abroad. It’s not only ineffective, it’s potentially, sometimes actually, harmful.” Most recently, earlier this year, I blogged about volunteers themselves speaking out about voluntourism. I so appreciate these honest accounts of people who have paid to volunteer abroad and found the experience lacking in terms of actually helping local people or the environment – and even found it to be harmful.

My consulting colleague, sometimes presentation partner 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 those who have paid-to-volunteer abroad and are now speaking out about their negative experiences.

Erin’s academic research after her Jordan experience came from her desire to know why some NGOs recruit volunteers from other countries. Erin’s research started with an initial survey of 248 NGOs that are not based in the USA and host international volunteers – people from outside of country of the location of the host NGO. Then she conducted a more in-depth survey of 31 NGOs from that group or 18.8% of the original 248. I wish she had limited her research to what I’m most interested in: those programs where volunteers are required to pay a fee to a volunteer-sending organization or to the host NGO – perhaps someone else will do that. Erin’s research was much broader: she looked at a range of NGOs, including those that do NOT charge any fees from volunteers. In fact, a majority of NGOs that responded to Erin’s surveys do not charge fees from volunteers, only 13.3% partnered with a volunteer-sending organization and just 8.5% had international volunteers placed with them by other kinds of partner organizations such as universities and faith groups. In addition, just 37.1% of responding organizations said international volunteers pay them a fee to volunteer with their organization. In addition, the survey was limited to NGOs who had registered on the Idealist.org web site, which means these NGOs are quite tech-savvy and independent – two qualities I don’t think are had by most local NGOs that host international volunteers in pay-to-volunteer-abroad schemes.

With all that said, the research is worth reading, to see how Internet-savvy, independent NGOs view international volunteers and the services they provide. I see these NGOs in Erin’s research as the kind of organizations that I recommend DIY volunteers abroad try to partner with when they want to travel and do good.

Here are some items from her research that are especially interesting – at least to me, because I think that these three findings would very likely be true of research that was limited to programs where international volunteers are charged a fee for their service:

  • Just over half of respondents – 50.4% – reported that they began hosting international volunteers only within the past five years, while 78.3% of respondents began hosting international volunteers within the past decade.
  • Overall, respondents reported that shorter terms of service were more common for their international volunteers than longer terms. For example, while 69.2% of respondents reported that international volunteers almost always or occasionally served for between 67 two weeks and one month, just over half as many reported having international volunteers almost always or occasionally stay for over one year.
  • Types of volunteer projects and roles varied widely with, by far, the most common type being teaching, classroom assistance, tutoring, and/or community education (61.3%). The next most common types of volunteer projects were construction and/or infrastructure development or improvements like painting, installations, etc. (17.8%), technology tasks like building websites (15.6%), and research, data collection, and reporting (12.4%).

I so hope someone out there will do similar research specifically on programs where volunteers are required to pay a fee to a volunteer-sending organization or to the host NGO. I hope they will take the research even farther and find out:

  • who identifies assignments for international volunteers (does the NGO define the assignment, do potential volunteers say “Here is how I would like to help and what I can do,” or does the volunteer sending agency say, “Here are volunteers and how you will use them”?)
  • not only if applicants need to meet minimal skills requirements, but how those requirements are verified
  • if the programs have written policies and procedures regarding sexual harassment and safety
  • what percentage of overall applicants that have the ability to pay are rejected from service by the agency, and what the reasons for those rejections are
  • how many of these agencies have conducted formal evaluations with resulting documentation regarding the impact these volunteers have on the agency or those that the agency services – not just satisfaction surveys among volunteers.

I would also love to know more about the process local NGOs must go through to request long-term international volunteers from

There is such a thing as effective short-term international volunteering. There is such a thing as quality program where volunteers need to pay a fee to the host organization. In fact, there are volunteering abroad programs where volunteers pay nothing, such as UN Volunteers, VSO and PeaceCorps – but such programs require a much, much longer commitment of volunteers than a few weeks.

My other blogs related to voluntourism:

Online volunteers help children & families separated by US Government / ICE at border

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An excellent example of virtual volunteering as digital activism: in this 25 June 2018 article, Wired.com notes how librarians and other humanities academics and geeks across the USA banded together to figure out where the government had sent immigrant children snatched from their parents at the border, to help their parents find them again and, eventually, reunite these families.

Excerpts from this Wired article:

Alex Gil was IMing with his colleague Manan Ahmed when they decided they had to do something about children being separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border… Gil, a father of two, knew they could be useful. As the digital scholarship librarian at Columbia University, Gil’s job is to use technology to help people find information—skills he had put to use in times of crisis before. Gil and Ahmed, a historian at Columbia, assembled a team of what Gil calls “digital ninjas” for a “crisis researchathon.” These volunteers were professors, graduate students, researchers, and fellows from across the country with varied academic focus, but they all had two things in common: an interest in the history of colonialism, empire, and borders; and the belief that classical research methods can be used not just to understand the past but to reveal the present.

You can read the latest news about virtual volunteering, including online microvlunteering, digital activism, crowdsourcing for good and more at the Virtual Volunteering Wiki – specifically, the section on news.

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

Cuso International’s E-Volunteering Guide

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Cuso International is a non-profit international development organization based in Canada. Cuso places and supports highly-skilled volunteers from Canada and the USA in developing countries to support a variety of projects. It is similar to VSO in the UK, the Peace Corps in the USA, and the United Nations Volunteers program, part of UNDP.

Some years ago, Cuso International found that approximately 60% of the Cuso International volunteers who returned from their in-country placements continued to support their in-country program partners, usually NGOs, through various online activities. Cuso International established E-Connect program “to formalize and enhance this activity that is occurring already and lend further work experience credibility to the distance support provided by the volunteers.” Its E-Connect program is not limited to returning volunteers: many of its online volunteering opportunities are for any skilled person that meets the experience requirements, though most roles are limited to Canadian Citizens and Permanent Residents only.

Cuso International also produced the nine-page E-Connect: Cuso International’s E-Volunteering Guide. The guide offers an overview of the kinds of online volunteering Cuso International supports and a table of task-based support ideas for online volunteering. Online volunteers involved with Cuso International complete a Scope of Work document for each placement at the beginning of the assignment. This document outlines the overall project goals, planned tasks, and deliverables associated with the volunteer assignment. “Online volunteers complete different reporting documents at varying times during their e-placement to measure their project’s impact on their program partner over time as well as to monitor their own experience throughout their journey.”

In another guide for online volunteers, Cuso International makes this important observation about virtual volunteering, one that I’ve made for many years:

E-Volunteer placements may be perceived as “easier”, or not as commitment-intensive than in-country placements as you do not have to re-locate countries, follow a routine schedule, or perform the work in-person on someone else’s time. However, online placements can be just as rigorous and involved and volunteers may have to work harder on communication, assume a greater individual responsibility, and be more proactive to have a successful e-placement.

vvbooklittleThere are lots more suggestions and specifics about virtual volunteering, including task and role development, suggestions on support and supervision of online volunteers, guidelines for evaluating virtual volunteering activities, suggestions for risk management, online safety, ensuring client confidentiality and setting boundaries for relationships in virtual volunteering, and much more in The LAST Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, available both as a traditional printed book and as a digital book. There is also a great deal of information about online volunteers working directly with clients, as well as the chapter written for online volunteers themselves. The book is by myself (Jayne Cravens) and Susan Ellis.

Also see:

tasks for a university intern at your organization

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One of the most under-utilized resources for nonprofits is university students who want (and need) a high-responsibility work experience in association with whatever degree they are studying. There are business management, marketing, human resources management, accounting and other types of students who have the time, skills and mandate to work at a nonprofit anywhere from a month to four months, often for an entire university semester, but they struggle to find placements.

Your organization should regularly brainstorm what such an intern could do at your organization. Here are some of my ideas, which skew heavily to marketing and public relations, per my own work:

  • explore, compile and index a photo and video archive for your organization
  • develop an online archive of photos, with proper keywords and descriptions, at Flickr or another online photo archive
  • explore and compile your organization’s FAQs
  • survey participants in an event or program about their experience. This is one of my very favorite assignments for an intern, because it’s something I really need done and, often, the targets of the survey are more likely to speak freely with a university student than me (they don’t want to hurt my feelings).
  • review past surveys looking for pull quotes specifically for grant applications and marketing materials
  • explore, compile and index a paper archive of publications your organization has produced over the years
  • design a brochure, newsletter, or other publication
  • review your web site for ways it could be more accessible, and implement at least some of the recommendations (replacing all “click here” and “read more” links with descriptive links instead, adding in alt tags for photos, making sure every page has a title, etc.)
  • creating a more robust section of your web site regarding volunteering, including an online version of your volunteer application, a list of what volunteers do at your organization, your volunteer policies, etc.
  • compile and index an archive of press coverage about your organization or a particular program, since your organization launched or for just a set period
  • research and compile a list of reporters at area media outlets who have written or produced stories about a particular topic and, therefore, might be interested in writing or producing a story about your organization
  • manage an online community your organization hosts, helping with technical support, answering questions (as appropriate) and bringing urgent issues to the attention of the appropriate person  (but remember that at least one regular staff member should still be reading the group regularly and responding)
  • help at an event, such as at the registration table
  • populate Twitter lists
  • transcribe/caption your YouTube videos or podcasts
  • be your official photographer/videographer at various activities and events, and then splicing together the material into a promotional video (remind them to use copyright-free music if they decide to use music)
  • create a display for your lobby or front of office about a program, an event, a particular subject your nonprofit addresses, etc.
  • research public outdoor events in your area – dates, times, places – where your nonprofit could have an information table or booth
  • researching and compiling a list of commercial kitchens in a town or neighborhood that your organization might be able to use for an event (at senior centers, churches or other communities of faith, cultural centers, etc.), and profiling each in terms of costs, parking, access to public transit, accessibility, etc.

What I won’t put an intern in charge of is social media. This is a high-profit interactive public task that should always be managed by someone permanently at your organization. It’s too important of a role to leave to a temporary staff person, whether intern or consultant.

Whether paid or unpaid, an internship at a nonprofit or government agency, in my opinion, should have these characteristics:

  • It should give the intern an opportunity coordinate, even direct, a project, one he or she can take credit for directing or coordinating.
  • It should give the intern an opportunity to suggest, perhaps even formally design, approaches and solutions.
  • It should include the intern attending staff meetings – and that includes staff meetings outside of the department where the intern will be working.

If it’s an unpaid internship, it also needs to be 20  hours or less and be as flexible as possible, since the intern will probably have a paid job to earn income some he or she can participate in this internship. That means some tasks need to be able to be done in the evenings, on weekends, and remotely from the workplace. My thoughts on the ethics of not paying interns can be found here.

Remember that, at the end of such an internship, you need to talk with the intern about what they learned, what they accomplished, and how the internship might affect their future studies or career. Otherwise, you are ignoring the learning experience that is supposed to be at the heart of an internship.

Summer Webinars on Volunteer Engagement

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My dear colleague Erin Barnhart (Effective Altruism) is organizing summer webinars on selected Fridays regarding expanding skills in volunteer engagement, some featuring my other dear colleague, Liza Dyer, and some featuring me! The webinars are in June and July and, if interest is high, we’ll keep doing them!

These webinars are intense, fun, interactive, an hour long (never more), affordable and each focused on ONE aspect of effective volunteer engagement. We designed these topics based on what we are all hearing from people working with volunteers, in any capacity, as well as our own experiences as managers of volunteers and as volunteers ourselves.

Here’s the schedule:

Friday, June 8: Social Media + Volunteer Engagement 

Friday, June 15: Rebooting Volunteer Roles and Opportunities (Reinventing Your Volunteer Program series)

Friday, June 22: Reimagining Volunteer Recruitment (Reinventing Your Volunteer Program series)

Friday, June 29: Revising Communications and Supervision (Reinventing Your Volunteer Program series)

Friday, July 6: Revisiting Support, Recognition, and Retention (Reinventing Your Volunteer Program series)

Friday, July 13: Building Stronger Staff-Volunteer Relationships

All webinars at 11 PDT (Los Angeles time) / 2 pm EDT (New York time).

Individual webinars are $25 each, or you can buy access to all four of the webinars in the Reinventing Your Volunteer Program series for $75.

Register for any individual webinar at the links above.

Questions? Email Erin Barnhart at erin@erinlbarnhart.com

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:

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

Volunteers themselves speaking out about their unethical voluntourism experiences

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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 unethical 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 in unethical programs (in contrast to ethical ones) who are speaking out – it’s also people who were exploited in unethical programs:

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 of calling out unethical voluntourism programs (in contrast to ethical ones).  

There are ethical voluntourism programs. They are few and far between, but they do exist. An ethical voluntourism program:

  • Is led by local people.
  • Is transparent about how the funds paid by volunteers are used.
  • Does not take away local jobs (in fact, very often, it creates them, or funds local workers).
  • Does not bring volunteers into contact with wildlife or supposed “orphans”, or unsupervised contact with children.
  • Is focused on a project that has a measurable outcome valued by the local community, one that might not happen, or not happen as quickly, without the volunteers’ participation.
  • Has safety and safeguarding policies and requires volunteers to be trained regarding such.
  • Has a process to vet volunteers, to assure they are appropriate to be involved in the program.
  • Educates volunteers about the region or country where volunteers will work, the issues and challenges that have led to the need for your program, etc.
  • Does not reinforce colonialist ideas or White Supremacy.

If you want to help abroad and not pay for the experience, then get involved locally and get the expertise that’s needed by volunteer sending agencies that don’t charge (but expect you to stay for a lot longer than a couple of weeks!). You shouldn’t feel that you should get to do something abroad that requires expertise – 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!

June 2025: I went on a voluntourism project. Yes, really. And it was awesome. It met all of my criteria of ethical voluntourism. 

My other blogs on this subject:

Recognizing university sports players for their community service

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If you follow sports in the USA, then you have heard of all-star teams and all-conference teams –  but how about a Community Service Team honor?

The Southeastern Conference is a governing body for more than a dozen universities in the Southern USA: the University of Alabama, University of Arkansas, University of Auburn, University of Florida, Georgia, University of Kentucky, Louisiana State University, the University of Mississippi, Mississippi State University, University of Missouri, University of South Carolina, University of Tennessee, Texas A&M University and Vanderbilt University. I just found out that, each year, the SEC chooses a “Community Service Team” of basketball players from among SEC schools – a men’s team and a women’s team. At a different time, they do the same regarding football. The honor goes to players in recognition of their off-the-court/off-the-field volunteering and community service activities. Like an all-conference team or an all-state team, the Community Service Team is a hypothetical team – the members won’t actually get together and play a game.

I’m from Kentucky, so I’ve grown up with SEC teams. The SEC Women’s Basketball Community Service Team for 2018 includes Makenzie Cann of Lawrenceburg, Kentucky and a junior at UK. She has volunteered more than 150 hours at the Lexington Humane Society working with the marketing and fundraising team, spent time building houses and a local park with Habitat for Humanity, visited with children at the UK Children’s Hospital and Breakfast with Santa program, has packed backpacks of food for local kids, has volunteered at several local elementary schools afterschool program and spent an afternoon at the local YMCA playing basketball with kids.

This year’s SEC Men’s Basketball Community Service Team includes Dillon Pulliam from Cynthiana, Kentucky and a sophomore at UK. He volunteered in a telethon to support victims of Hurricane Harvey, a food backpack program, a mission trip to Belize, as a counselor in the UK basketball camp and been a guest speaker at a local elementary school.

I wish these players got even half as much attention for this honor as for their university team winning the SEC conference tournament or the NCAA tournament!

Also see:

My favorite Super Bowl moment: NFL Man of the Year