Tips To Volunteer Without Using A Placement Organization

August 3, 2007

Is Voluntourism weighing down volunteer based organizations or helping them stay afloat?

After reading an interesting couple of articles about Voluntourism by Rob on his site Go Budget Travel, I have decided to help provide some tips to avoid being caught in a volunteer placement program which will ultimately charge you a fortune without the majority of the money going back to the project.

The only time I think placements are appropriate are for the first time traveler who doesn’t have any experience and is feeling very intimidated. In this case a very short placement may be helpful as the program will provide an informative basis from which you can grow your own traveling wings.

Tips On How to Organize Your Own Volunteering Experience

1. Idealist.org is an excellent resource which has thousands of postings for volunteers throughout the world.

2. Research the volunteer placement websites and gain enough information to find the organization through google and contact the coordinators directly.

3. Find other programs within the country and e-mail the coordinators asking if they know of any projects in your field of interest. Usually the volunteer organizations are knowledgeable about each other and would be happy to help.

In terms of the ethical basis of voluntourism (which typically charges many times the actual organizations rates to facilitate placement) we must first recognize what ethical means. Ethics deals with what we “ought” or “ought not” to do. So the question becomes ought placement organizations to exist even though they charge exorbitant rate to bring in volunteers?

I know many of the people I met while volunteering with sea turtles in Costa Rica had be placed by an organization, and they were quite happy to have had such help as they were completely inexperienced travelers. If these placement organizations did not exist, then many of these green volunteers would have not had the confidence to be able to organize either the placement or transportation themselves.

In this case having these placement organizations represents a good as it is involving volunteers in projects who otherwise might not become involved. Perhaps like many things, in your first involvement without experience you end up paying a fortune, but in a way you are paying for the experience which will enable you to learn and become an independent traveler for the rest of your life.