In 2014, a 21-year-old working for a tech startup, Pippa Biddle, published a post on her blog which set fire to an already kindling conversation about the ethics of volunteering abroad. The post was titled “The problem with little white girls (and boys): why I stopped being a voluntourist.” Previously, her posts had gotten at most a few thousand views. This one got ten thousand in the first couple of hours and more than two million within two weeks.
Before her experiences with voluntourism, Biddle shared a common belief: aiding the less fortunate is an almost universally accepted good. Whether it is volunteering at a soup kitchen or donating money to a good cause, many people take the chance to give back.
Volunteering meets tourism
In the past decade, the idea of volunteering abroad has significantly increased in popularity, mainly among those in their late teens and early twenties. Groups travel to villages in Africa or South America to help build a school or help out in an orphanage. The volunteers stay for a week or two then return to their own homes with a new outlook and an Instagram feed full of foreign children.
These volunteer groups seem to have overly optimistic opinions about the long lasting effects their trips have on a community. Building a school doesn’t ensure the continued staffing and support of that school when the volunteers are long gone. This is just one dilemma Biddle faced after a trip to Tanzania to build a library.
Pay to play
Hundreds of travel companies exist solely to facilitate volunteer opportunities abroad. While some are for-profits and others are non-profits, all are run as businesses, encouraging “travelers” to pay a fee to lend a hand across the globe for a week or two.
One such organization, which Pippa Biddle worked with in high school though she went to Tanzania with a different group, is the Canadian based WE Charity and its affiliate organizations. WE Charity hosts Me to We days which attract thousands of young teenagers to large auditoriums for talks by celebrities and motivational speakers that sound strangely like they could just as easily be taking place in an evangelical church. In an interview with the HPR, Biddle emphasized the confusing nature of just what falls under the WE umbrella. “They are helping kids create groups which are focused on giving back and raising money and helping build schools, but one of their ultimate goals is to get kids to go on trips, and their trips are for-profit.”
Ineffective Altruism
While voluntourism organizations like this may have the laudable goal of exposing more children to service, the monetized aspect raises ethical questions. Reinier Vriend is the founder and president of Volunteer Correct [VC], which aims to expose the flow and use of money within voluntourism organizations, and to assist them in making changes to encourage more ethical volunteering. VC has produced over a dozen videos about responsible voluntouring, some of which investigate where the money from volunteers actually goes.
But even when organizations like VC help reform voluntourism programs, and spending is completely transparent, , how much help is really provided? For an opportunity to assist in a childcare center in Rio three days a week through a popular voluntourism company, volunteers pay $780 per week, which includes accommodations, breakfast, travel health insurance and an airport shuttle. Round-trip flights from Boston to Rio range from a mere $850 to around $3000. Meanwhile, the monthly price of private preschool and kindergarten in Rio is around $100 U.S./week. Assuming a volunteer gets an $850 flight, one volunteer, who would have assisted for three days in a childcare center, could pay for a child to attend a good kindergarten for 4 months with the money they would spend to volunteer. By giving up a second week of volunteering, there would be enough money saved to pay for two more months of kindergarten for a child in Rio.
Hindrance not Help
Moreover, much of the work performed by volunteers working abroad falls under the general category of manual labor: painting fences, moving supplies, and building schools, libraries, houses, and so on. But most teens and college age adults have little to no experience in construction. Even fewer know anything about the materials and methods used in their destination country. The help that they can provide to communities is therefore minimal at best, as the abundance of local, unskilled, and unemployed laborers is almost universal.
Biddle traveled to Tanzania with a group from her high school. They spent most of their days mixing concrete and laying bricks for the library walls at an orphanage. What made her experience different from that of other voluntourists, was one early morning walk where she discovered that the previous night local masons had been tearing down the unstable walls she and her classmates had built and were re-building them. Biddle realized that the only work she and her classmates had done was double that of the local masons.
Biddle was sixteen when she took her trip to Tanzania, but published her blog post five years later, in 2014, when she was 21. In an interview with the HPR, Biddle says the event had always been on her mind, but soon before publishing her article she was speaking with the director of the Clinica de Familia, a medical clinic she was involved with in the Dominican Republic, about how volunteers fit into the structure of the clinic. It was only then that Biddle found the words to express how she felt: she was this ‘little white girl’ inserting herself into a culture and a job she didn’t know enough about.
Blog post backlash
The reaction to Biddle’s blog post was quick and diverse. She was praised for coming to terms with the reality of volunteering abroad and attacked for focusing on race as opposed to economics. A notable critic, Colin Flaherty, published an article entitled “Pippa Biddle, America’s Whitest Reported Takes up the Black Cause” in which he claimed she suggested “that all white people traveling to help black people are racist and wrongheaded and harmful.”
Many thought her claims about voluntourism in general were too broad. Countless comments on her post follow the same structure: cautious agreement then a warning that not all programs are the same. While Biddle’s experience is on the far side of extreme, it causes global citizens to question whether their time is actually valuable to the communities they are “serving.”
How the other half lives
Since her blog post went viral, Biddle has been asked to speak at high schools, colleges, and conferences and to reflect on her experiences with the voluntourism industry. She says “the most common response [to her speeches] is people who are a little bit forlorn.” They come to her after talks looking for confirmation that their own experiences were actually helpful, but Biddle emphasizes that she is not the authority on that idea. She encourages investing in communities. Giving things away is not a sustainable plan for economic growth, but “buying from local restaurants rather than going to the McDonalds is investment.” Communities run on money, and supporting that structure with your dollar, even without any volunteering, can have a lasting impact on the region.
Vriend, president of Volunteer Correct, told the HPR that the involvement of unskilled volunteers should be limited. “There is no proof that volunteer tourism in its totality is doing anything towards achieving developmental goals. With unskilled volunteers, what can they actually do that would bring more than anyone else can do?”
Robert Lough, senior researcher for the United Nations Volunteers and associate professor at the University of Illinois School of Social Work echoed to the HPR that this category of unskilled short-term work has little effect on communities. “As far as long term impacts on tangible things, they don’t contribute much.” Vriend would like it to stay that way, stating that the ideal voluntourist interaction is limited, enjoyable for both the volunteer and the voluntoured, and takes special precautions to protect the development of the children involved.
Vriend gave the example of Surfpop, an organization whose volunteers teach kids from local schools how to swim and surf. The kids have relatively stable home situations, and the volunteers provide no strictly necessary services. They just provide access to an enriching activity the kids wouldn’t otherwise participate in.
It may seem counterintuitive to purposefully avoid working with vulnerable kids, those in bad living situations or in orphanages, but Vriend stressed the importance of this. The constant flow of incoming tourists who form close attachments just in time to disappear can have a negative impact on their development.
In the documentary Volunteers Unleashed, Efren Aparicio speaks about how he began volunteering as a teacher in an orphanage in Cambodia after traveling there from his home country of Spain. He had no teaching experience, but the orphanage was short on teachers, so they welcomed him. He was excited to make an impact, but after a few weeks realized the kids had made almost no progress. “They probably need a proper teacher, not just a random volunteer.” Even though any teacher rather than no teacher seems ideal, the net effect can actually be negative.
An extreme example is the orphanage voluntourism industry in Cambodia. Orphans, some of whom actually have living parents, are purposefully made to look desolate to increase cash flow from tourists, but the money is not often used for their benefit. Volunteers at these orphanages actively contribute to a cycle of hurt for the children they are trying to help. Vriend recognizes problems such as this and thinks that having free, if unskilled, teachers can perversely incentivize the state to direct less money to education. Merely throwing warm bodies at a problem is not helping. Instead, these communities could benefit from skilled volunteers who could educate caregivers or actually assist with construction work.
Cautious Optimism
Robert Lough told the HPR that it is valuable to understand the perspectives of people who accept these volunteers. “Across the board if you ask [members of communities being visited by voluntourists], ‘Would you like these [unskilled] volunteers in the community or would you rather they didn’t come?’ The answer is always ‘Yes, we want them.’” The voluntourism industry, if relatively futile in it’s main initiatives, is not usually some evil scheme in disguise.
When voluntourists come in as a group of outsiders and fail to pay attention to the community’s needs and reactions it can have devastating effects; however, the idea of a group of people caring enough to travel around the world has positive impacts. Lough says members of these communities “often talk about feeling validated and feeling like someone cares, which has tangible value.” These positive experiences can also get voluntourists on a road to making real, meaningful change through long-term, skilled volunteering later in life.
As Lough says, “It may or may not make a tangible development impact – probably doesn’t ‒ but they have exposure and experience with a low-income community that will often change their perspective on global power relations and their role in the world.” Through her experiences with voluntourism, Pippa Biddle realized that for her, providing meaningful assistance to communities she cares about means contributing funds rather than labor. This is the silver lining: While voluntourists may not provide lasting international impact, their experiences often set them on the path toward doing greater good, just not always in the way they imagine.
Image Credit: Martin Bekerman