The Problem With Little White Girls (and Boys) — Culture Club. White people aren’t told that the color of their skin is a problem very often. We sail through police check points, don’t garner sideways glances in affluent neighborhoods, and are generally understood to be predispositioned for success based on a physical characteristic (the color of our skin) we have little control over beyond sunscreen and tanning oil. After six years of working in and traveling through a number of different countries where white people are in the numerical minority, I’ve come to realize that there is one place being white is not only a hindrance, but negative — most of the developing world.
In high school, I travelled to Tanzania as part of a school trip. There were 14 white girls, 1 black girl who, to her frustration, was called white by almost everyone we met in Tanzania, and a few teachers/chaperones. $3000 bought us a week at an orphanage, a half built library, and a few pickup soccer games, followed by a week long safari. Some might say that that’s enough. What's wrong with volunteer travel?: Daniela Papi at TEDxOxbridge. Volunteerism vs. Voluntourism.
A few years ago I joined a travel-related website while researching a trip to Panama. Some of you know will know it as Travellerspoint.com. I have spent quite a bit of my online time over there and one of the common questions posed in the forums deals with volunteerism. “This company charges $X,XXX for a 2 month program. Is that cheap?” Or “Is this company on the up & up?”
Or “Shouldn’t volunteering be free as long as I get there? I was reminded of this, once again, when my husband and I introduced a close friend to an organization that is a sanctuary for injured and displaced wolves. So, I’m done pontificating and here are your replies: Dave (The Longest Way Home) This is a topic really hits me hard. I’ve seen these two terms merge over the years and truly; I don’t like it. There are thousands of organizations that come under the “NGO” banner that are merely set up to make money. I’ve also seen college graduates leave, with great intentions, to help build houses and teach. Matthew Kepnes. Poverty Tourism: A Debate in Need of Typological Nuance | Staying for Tea. Toward a Common Language and Taxonomy of Poverty Tourism _________________________________________________UPDATE: An updated graphic with new notes has been posted at Poverty Tourism Taxonomy 2.o__________________________________________________ Poverty Tourism has lately been the subject of renewed blogger chatter and debate.
It seems a perennial issue that gets a paroxysm of attention each time a major media outlet runs a story on it. The latest series of posts was set off by a recent NYT op-ed by Kennedy Odede, a Kenyan who had some personal experience and harsh words for what he called Slumdog Tourism. The tone has ranged from reflective to outright shrill. A decent assemblage of some relevant blogs and articles was posted a couple days ago at Good Intentions Are Not Enough. As I read through these and other posts, it became apparent that many bloggers were talking past each other and using wildly different working definitions of what poverty tourism (or development tourism) is.
A rant about overseas volunteering | davecoles. For those of you who know me you might be a bit surprised to see the title of this blog. Through my work with KickStart Ghana and other roles I am normally telling everyone how fantastic volunteering is and why they should get involved. I also espouse the benefits of overseas volunteering and tell people that it can be so much better than a normal trip abroad. However, having been inspired by three really interesting and passionate panel debates I’ve seen and been part of this week and seen some dodgy advice on various websites I thought I’d write a blog entry about a few things that are wrong with the overseas volunteering sector. 1.
Volunteering overseas is not a holiday! Volunteering overseas is hard work! 2. If you see this on a volunteer website, shut off the computer and walk away. 3. This is related to the point above. 4. Cheap overseas volunteering equals good and expensive equals bad right? 5. Many, many people write about which organisations are ‘good’ and which ones are ‘bad’. Global health experiences – do they do good? Summertime for many university students, reeling from aftermaths of their exams, may mean relaxing on the beach with friends.
However, for many eager and forward-looking students, it is an opportunity to gain experience: international experience. Today, one can hardly walk through a university campus without noticing posters taped to lamp posts or bulletin boards with words “international”, “service”, “volunteer” and “experience” highlighted across them. It is a growing trend among undergraduate or medical students to spend their summers working on projects in underprivileged settings around the world, ranging from providing shelter, teaching English, or gaining medical experience. The industry is growing at an exponential rate in North America and Europe, but are there potential pitfalls to these popular programs? Imagine walking into a clinic and discovering a new face behind the doctor’s desk.
Equally important is that international volunteers very often lack cultural competency. Read This Before You Voluntour - Part I. GoVoluntouring founder Aaron Smith standing in a big hole Like eco-tourism, voluntourism is not always all it’s cracked up to be. Just as ecotourism is, at its best, an effort to slightly reduce the impact of the inherently ecologically harmful act of moving around the world recreationally, voluntourism would seem largely to be more about the tourist than whatever volunteer labour the trip’s ostensibly about. And at its worst, it builds things that aren’t needed or can’t be used, and even displaces local labour in favour of the unpaid and unskilled labour of the well-meaning but essentially frivolous traveller.
Building schools sounds lovely, for instance, but without an infrastructure to train teachers and, more importantly, a fund to pay them, these structures sometimes end up being nothing more than elaborate squats. It turns out, he was as suspicious of voluntourism as I was. Sometimes, it’s even worse than that. Voluntourism: What You Need to Know Before Signing up | jetsettimes. BY BRENDAN RIGBY, Director and Co-founder WhyDev.org Mizoram is a little known state in northeast India, located between Bangladesh and Burma (Myanmar).
Occupying an environment of rolling hills, its capital Aizawl is perched across a ridge line, creating a dramatically beautiful and steep city. As far as Indian states go, Mizoram does not fit the stereotype. You would be forgiven if you did not think you were in India. The majority of the state’s population are a collection of several ethnic communities, who are culturally and linguistically linked and collectively known as Mizo, meaning ‘people of the hills’. It is estimated that between 50,000-100,000 refugees from Burma are residing in northeast India, mostly in Mizoram. However, to gain official status as a refugee, in the hope of finding protection and being resettled in a third country, the Chin have to make their way to The UN Refugee Agency’s (UNHCR) office in New Delhi.
The CRR, led by Dr. The Pearls The Dedicated The Analytic. The Word "Voluntourism" And Its Nasty Connotations | Volunteer Global. Voluntourism is Responsible Tourism, Right? « How to catch a goat by its tail. In the past several years, many questions and opinions have been forming around the growing trend of voluntourism. Why do people do it? Does it really make a difference? Who are we actually helping and who are we unintentionally hurting? Do they even want us here? Who’s really benefiting, them or us? Last week, the Director of Sustainable Bolivia held a Charla (a small chat) on the topic of responsible tourism: what does it mean and why we do it. People who choose to volunteer abroad are doing it for countless reasons.
So why do I choose to do it? I volunteer abroad because I want to be a responsible tourist. And what about the cost? While I may look like the richest person in the world to some of the people from developing countries, I am not the richest person in my country. With that, I leave you with the same parting words delivered at the Charla. Go slow. Thank you, Ryan, for the thought-provoking discussion and inspirational quotes.
Like this: Like Loading... ‘Voluntourism’- Volunteering or Tourism? | Volunteer Forever. Posted August 19, 2012 by Volunteer Forever 0 Comments By Jessica Barnfield What comes first: the chicken or the egg? An age-old question which has puzzled some of the greatest philosophical thinkers throughout time. Perhaps the next great question to plague our minds will become: what comes first: the volunteering, or the tourism? With voluntourism becoming one of the most rapidly expanding travel markets in the world, it’s worth asking ourselves what our real motivations are when we set off to volunteer abroad. Volunteering abroad isn’t as easy as packing up your bags and going on holiday for a few weeks. It’s certainly true that volunteering abroad shouldn’t be taken lightly, or purely out of a desire to travel, but in reality the two can be very compatible goals.
Volunteer work can be very taxing – physically and often emotionally as well. It’s also important to understand the culture of the place in which you’re volunteering. Now, back to that chicken and egg dilemma… “Volunteering” or “Voluntourism” – who cares! It’s how you design it! | Lessons I Learned. There is a discussion about volunteering/voluntourism going on here, Part 1 and here, Part 2. I decided to add my long-winded and opinionated post obviously tainted by working in Cambodia and being passionate about the responsibility implicit in these issues.
As someone who has worked in Cambodia for almost five years, this is a debate I often find myself in, especially since I run what could be considered a “voluntourism” organization. Due to the fact that “volunteer” is a word people are utilizing in their internet searches, much more than “service learning” or “experiential education”, I have allowed the word to stay on our website, but I don’t like our guests thinking of themselves as “volunteers”, as that highlights the “giving”, and what I want to highlight for them is the “learning”.We don’t call our guests volunteers when they arrive or when we discuss our programs with them.
(Forgive the length of this. Home | The VolunTourist. Voluntourism: What Could Go Wrong When Trying To Do Right? While joining and leading volunteer programs in Asia for the past decade, I have seen many of the same mistakes repeated over and over again when it comes to international "voluntourism. " Here are some of the common problems I have seen in the voluntourism market and some tips for travelers on how to choose the right program. Creating one-off projects which have little long-term impact Often times the real needs of a project are not things that volunteers can easily support. Language barriers, lack of local knowledge and lack of skills prevent volunteers from being a good fit for most development project needs, so instead tour companies often create projects for the travelers.
Real life example: I traveled with a tour company that decided to allow us to paint the school that was on their bike route. We painted it poorly as we rushed to complete it in one day (and most of us felt too tired to put in a big effort). Monitoring projects poorly or not at all Fostering moral imperialism. Why you shouldn’t participate in voluntourism. Leila de Bruyne: Voluntourism: We Have to Stop Making This About Your Niece. When I signed up to volunteer at an orphanage in Africa, I pictured myself somewhere in the Serengeti, dressed in Banana Republic. I had always wanted to be one of those people concerned with world affairs and after declaring anthropology as my major, I opted to add some humanitarian travels to my resume. Arriving in the slums of Nairobi, the summer after my first year in college, I was utterly unprepared to be standing face-to-face with absolute, abject poverty: over 300 children squeezed into a crumbling building; hungry bodies sleeping on a cement floor in urine-soaked clothes.
I had hoped to be changed by encounters with poverty. I wanted the profound. I wanted to be the girl at a dinner party who the hostess points to and says: "and she worked in Africa. " Don't be embarrassed for me. My heart was good. I sought advice from my esteemed professor (whom I wanted desperately to impress). Richard Stupart: Voluntourism does more harm than good.
A leading ethical travel company has removed all volunteering trips to orphanages from its site, citing concerns that "volunteers are fueling the demand for orphans. " We wrote about this topic in 2011 -- here's the piece again, let us know what you think in the comments. Whether it’s spending time at an orphanage in Cambodia, or helping build houses in Haiti, ethical tourism, or voluntourism, seems pretty morally unambiguous. What could possibly be wrong with helping the unfortunate? This feels even more the case when we are personally involved in making the difference, rather than throwing coins in a collection tin thousands of kilometers away. The result has been a boom in tour companies offering voluntourism opportunities in a wide range of destinations, catering to all levels of commitment. Want to spend weeks building houses in Port-au-prince, or stop in and paint half a wall in a local school somewhere in Southeast Asia? Somewhere out there, a voluntourism outfit has you covered.
Voluntourism setting standards thorny issue - Welcome to Totem Tourism. Setting the standard for volunteer tourism sector - attempts to establish best practice for volunteering projects The volunteer tourism sector is now well and truly established within the travel industry, with an increasing number of organisations offering volunteering products. However the rapid growth of the sector has led to concern over the validity of volunteer tourism projects, the level of support provided to volunteers and the benefits to local communities.
In response to this, there is now a movement towards developing best practice guidelines and standards for volunteer tourism organisations. This is certainly a thorny issue, with many people within the industry disagreeing with the idea of regulation of volunteer tourism organisations. One viewpoint is that there are too many different types of volunteer tourism organisations and projects to develop an achievable universal standard. There is also criticism about how the standards will be verified. Voluntourism: Helping or Hurting? Voluntourism Research « Voluntourism Gal. VoluntourismGal is the blog of the consulting practice Lasso Communications. At Lasso we try to further the voluntourism field through helping companies with strategic decisions, marketing campaigns and research. Below is a combination of studies we have been involved in as well as some great studies we feel everyone should read.
Social Media Usage Patterns Among Travel Tour Operators State of the Volunteer Travel Industry 2009 Volunteer Travel Insights 2009 Climate Change and Its Impact on Adventure Tourism “Generation G – Generosity” Sustainable Travel International’s Best Practices U.S. Perceived Effects of International Volunteering: Reports from Alumni Traveler’s Philanthropy: Do’s and Don’ts of Travel Giving ATTA – SEO Releases 101 Webinar Like this: Like Loading... 9 thoughts on “Voluntourism Research” Leave a Reply Follow Get every new post delivered to your Inbox. Join 59 other followers Powered by WordPress.com %d bloggers like this: