"This year, over ten million people will go abroad, eager to find the perfect blend of adventure and altruism. Volunteer travel can help you find your place in the world--and find out what you're made of. So why do so many international volunteer programs fail to make an impact? Why do some do more harm than good? Learning Service offers a powerful new approach that invites volunteers to learn from host communities before trying to 'help' them. It's also a thoughtful critique of the sinister side of volunteer travel; a guide for turning good intentions into effective results; and essential advice on how to make the most of your experience."--Amazon.com.
T-Kits (Training kits) are a product of the Partnership Agreement on European Youth Worker Training run by the CoE and the European Communities Commission
In a 2014 essay that went viral, Pippa Biddle revealed the inequities and absurdities baked into voluntourism--the pairing of short-term, unskilled volunteer work with tourism. In the years since, Biddle has devoted herself to understanding the origins, intentions, and outcomes of a multibillion-dollar industry built on the premise of doing good, and she tracks that investigation in Ours to Explore. The flaws of voluntourism have included xenophobia, racism, paternalism, and a "West knows best" mentality. From exploitative orphanages that keep children in squalid conditions to attract donors to undertrained medical volunteers practicing their skills on patients in developing regions and to those looking for an inspiring selfie, Biddle reveals the hidden costs of the voluntourism complex. Along the way, readers meet inspiring activists and passionate community members, as well as thoughtful former voluntourists who still work to make a difference--just differently. Ours to Explore offers a plan for how the service-based travel industry can break the cycle of exploitation and suggests strategies for travelers who want to improve the places they visit for the long haul.
Overseas volunteering has exploded in numbers and interest in the last couple of decades. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people travel from wealthier to poorer countries to participate in short-term volunteer programs focused on health services. Churches, universities, nonprofit service organizations, profit-making "voluntourism" companies, hospitals, and large corporations all sponsor brief missions. Hoping to Help is the first book to offer a comprehensive assessment of global health volunteering, based on research into how it currently operates, its benefits and drawbacks, and how it might be organized to contribute most effectively. Given the enormous human and economic investment in these activities, it is essential to know more about them and to understand the advantages and disadvantages for host communities. Most people assume that poor communities benefit from the goodwill and skills of the volunteers. Volunteer trips are widely advertised as a means to "give back" and "make a difference." In contrast, some claim that health volunteering is a new form of colonialism, designed to benefit the volunteers more than the host communities. Others focus on unethical practices and potential harm to the presumed "beneficiaries." Judith N. Lasker evaluates these opposing positions and relies on extensive research—interviews with host country staff members, sponsor organization leaders, and volunteers, a national survey of sponsors, and participant observation—to identify best and worst practices. She adds to the debate a focus on the benefits to the sponsoring organizations, benefits that can contribute to practices that are inconsistent with what host country staff identify as most likely to be useful for them and even with what may enhance the experience for volunteers. Hoping to Help illuminates the activities and goals of sponsoring organizations and compares dominant practices to the preferences of host country staff and to nine principles for most effective volunteer trips.
Two days after Jill Hunting turned fifteen, she lost her only brother, a volunteer with International Voluntary Services and one of the first civilian casualties of the Vietnam War. News broadcasts and headlines announced to the world that Pete had been led into an ambush by friends. When Jill's mother told her that Pete's letters home had all been destroyed in a basement flood, the connection between Jill and her brother was lost forever—or so she thought. Decades later, 175 letters surfaced. Through them, and the sweethearts and many friends who had never forgotten Pete, Jill came to know him again. Finding Pete is one of the great, untold true stories of an escalating war and a young man caught in its sights. This personalized account of a critical moment in U.S. history is the moving story of an altruistic youth who personifies what America lost in Vietnam. It is also a portrait of a family's struggle with loss, a mother's damaging grief, and, most of all, a sister's quest to solve a mystery and recover the connection with her brother. Includes a reader's guide.
For a long time, volunteering lacked standardized data sets allowing methodologically robust comparative analyses and global policy making. Starting from 2011, the International Labour Office (ILO) and the United Nations (UN) have provided global statistical standards for organization-based and direct volunteering which offer path-breaking opportunities. The global statistical standards on volunteering are however only relatively known. They also have to face difficult methodological and substantial challenges: Can they really account for the local varieties of volunteering in the different areas of the world? Does their adoption further develop our knowledge of volunteering both at national and international level? Beyond illustrating which innovations these statistical standards bring and critically assessing the tensions between the global guidelines and the local differences, the book shows how the ILO and the UN standards can be implemented into national statistics and which advancements in the understanding of characters, antecedents and impacts of contemporary organization-based and direct volunteering they allow. The Volume takes Italy as an illustrative case that offers global value. This multidisciplinary book demonstrates that a holistic approach to the implementation of the ILO and UN guidelines permits to virtuously balance international statistical standards and locally embedded cultures as well as to move knowledge of volunteering forward in a complexity-driven agenda. The book provides tools, evidences and inspiration for scholars, statistical agencies, practitioners and policy-makers.
This special issue aims to validate the voices of southern partners in communities where international volunteering takes place. The collection deals with nine countries from the Global South: Peru, Guatemala, Jamaica, Costa Rica, Kenya, Malawi, Zambia, South Africa and India. Its individual chapters embody a distinctive approach that aims to decentre critical perspective by representing subaltern voices. The study's data is drawn from 212 individual interviews and 21 focus groups, and its findings are couched within critical and normative theories, which offer alternative views to the often dominant critical constructions that frame dialogue on international volunteering. This approach presents these stories and interpretations in a way that better situates the voices of the host organisation and community staff within historical, political, social and economic reality.
Presents a reference guide to over two hundred worldwide organizations for people who want to work in international nature conservation projects, providing descriptions of each site, the type of work needed, duration, language, costs, and application procedure.
Examines the increasing significance of the volunteer and volunteerism in African societies, and their societal impact within precarious economies in a period of massive unemployment and faltering trajectories of social mobility.
This book examines volunteering in detail from a civil society perspective, using empirical data garnered from various sources for countries all over the globe. The contributions deal with a broad spectrum of questions, ranging from the diversity, social and cultural determinants and organizational settings of volunteering, to its possible individual, social, and political effects.
