Volunteer Abroad: Who Does It Best?

Portions of this post comes from Voluntourism.org and is used with their permission.  Click Here to read the original post on their site.

Who Does It Best?

The answer is - No One. In the world of voluntourism there is no “best” - sorry to burst your bubble.

Sure, you will read the words “best practices” or peruse websites that discuss the various steps they have taken to ensure transparency in the communities, etc. And, very likely, such descriptors will continue to be expressed in the marketplace. But just because an operation utilizes the term “best” to describe anything it does, this is always being measured against some criteria - either criteria the entity itself has created or criteria that has been taken from somewhere else. How truly reliable can that be since it is based upon the idea of ‘reaching a finish line’?

The “best” operations are the ones that quietly go about their business day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year. They improve themselves, not based on some external criteria, but upon the criteria of where they were five years ago, last year at the same time, or three months ago. What have they learned from their experiences? What have they gained through input from voluntourists? What have the community residents shared with them about their overall operations?

These groups probably won’t show up on the front page of a search engine. They will not be seen in the annual awards for travel magazines. They will not be receiving recognition from responsible, sustainable, or other such websites. Why? Because they are too busy working with their constituents to make their programs BETTER. These are the types of entities you want to discover; in order to do so, you will have to dig - dig through websites, make phone calls, email folks, etc. It may seem like a chore, yet the reward far outmeasures any effort you will put into the discovery process.

Author and Malawi Projects Coordinator for I Live Here, J.B. MacKinnon, does a good job of putting everything in perspective with these three points:

The closest I’ve come to conclusions can be reduced to three:

1. First, nothing is likely to stop the increase in person-to-person contact between people of the richer nations and people of the poorer.
2. Second, there is much to be gained on both sides from this exchange.
3. Third, those gains will be made through a series of small, personal, humbling errors.”