Thanks to you both, Daniela and Saundra, for your thoughtful comments and takes on this subject. The question that I struggle with, especially with regard to this blog focusing on international career development, is: if someone wishes to volunteer for the purpose of both gaining experience for their international career and doing good in a community, how can they best find a program or opportunity that will benefit them in these ways, as well as benefit the community they are serving? How can they find a balance between “consummate development professional who knows exactly how to make a difference in X community or country” and “clueless, well-intentioned volunteer who ends up doing more harm than good”? I’m sure versions of both of these people exist somewhere, but it seems more likely that the majority of those doing development work abroad (whether paid or volunteer) fall somewhere in between—they’re neither absolutely certain of how to make a difference, nor are they constantly wreaking havoc with their general cluelessness. Thus my search for the middle ground…

I agree with Saundra that it seems as if Daniela’s self-check tool can aid in finding this middle ground, but other suggestions and ideas for potential international career seekers and volunteers would be much appreciated.

Thanks again for the great discussion,
Mark

However, I strongly disagree with your assumption that plopping people down somewhere they don’t know and asking them to do something they don’t know how to do can be incredibly rewarding to them and the aid recipients. While I agree that is may be rewarding for them, I question how often it is really rewarding for the aid recipients. What statistics or research are you using to back up this theory? All you offer in the column is your own personal experience. Anecdotally, I know of several sites that received either Peace Corps or VSO (Volunteer Service Overseas) volunteers that have decided not to accept future volunteers.

While I’m glad you were able to muddle through and figure out how to be an effective teacher, your case may well be the exception and not the rule. English teachers often had the best experience out of all Peace Corps volunteers. Even though they may not have had formal training they were already fluent in English – a rare skill in many places, their goal was to make people understand their own language and culture – not to have to be successful in developing a grassroots project in another culture, and they had at least 12 years of experience as a student in the educational system they were modeling.

Other development projects had much more mixed results. Imagine someone showing up in your home town, not knowing the language or culture and trying to start a livelihoods program even though they had never run a small business before and their only real experience was being a customer. Or what about foreigners showing up to open an orphanage with no actual training or experience in social services and their only experience in child development was baby sitting as a teenager. Foreigners show up and do this all the time. Would you, as the recipient, feel that this was a rewarding and enriching experience? Or would you feel that you had to spend all your time helping the foreigner keep from really screwing things up and causing more harm than good. Granted, through these struggles you may personally develop a life long friendship with the foreigner, but was it really the best thing for your community.

I appreciate Daniela’s work in trying to develop a self-check tool to help evaluate these types of projects and propose guidelines as to how they could best work. Setting some professional standards is critical to ensuring that these programs are well designed and in the best interest of those we are trying to help. I urge you to be careful in what you recommend, just because something is a meaningful and formative experience for the volunteer does not mean it was the same for the people the volunteer was “helping”.

Good Intentions are Not Enough: http://informationincontext.typepad.com

- volunteering abroad can be a fabulous learning experience for the traveler, can inspire (some) people to step up and fill the challenging role they have been left to fill, and, for those who were exposed to bad models for development, can often inspire those people to eventually go out and learn how to help to do it better

- when, often times, volunteers are placed in the wrong place, in the wrong role, or with the wrong skills, they can displace local labor, be largely ineffective at aiding anyone besides themselves, and in the worst cases, cause more harm than good

I also agree with your last sentence: “And while I tend to agree that good intentions aren’t always enough when it comes to a volunteer project, especially an international development one, I still heartily believe that arriving in a place with everything to learn can be a formative experience for all involved.” but I would ask, is it the volunteers fault that the position or match was wrong or potentially harmful, or the person “selling” or marketing the volunteer position?

Both, of course, but I would put more of the onus for successful project development on the volunteer operator, NGO, or travel agent selling the experience (even if it is indeed a “volunteer” one), to the traveler who, to be honest, probably doesn’t even know what he doesn’t know.

The more we can educate individual travelers to stop demanding harmful trips (tours to orphanages, support for corrupt organizations, labor displacements, etc), then the more we can decrease the overall demand for such trips and hopefully improve what is being offered. But, to be honest, what young British person would turn down a chance to be paid by their government to go on an international learning adventure if they are not able to find another job and likely believe that they can “do good” where they are going? As such, I hope that the British government has indeed chosen their volunteer placements well (although I am just ask skeptical as you are based on the comments you quoted).

From going over and over these same thoughts and discussions countless time, the team here at PEPY (www.pepytours.com), led by one of our own volunteers Karina Kloos, set out to develop a Voluntourism Self-Check tool for operators in the industry or those looking to get involved in voluntourism, asking questions one might ask to consider the impact of the offering. Volunteer positions and voluntourism share a lot of overlap with these questions, so it might be something you are interested in looking at or sharing with others.

http://lessonsilearned.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/Self-CheckToolVoluntourism101.pdf