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Volunteering travel guide

Volunteering abroad used to be a long term commitment for a highly qualified few. Today, opportunities have opened up for people of all skill levels, in virtually every country in the world. Habitat conservation, marine research, wildlife rehabilitation and community development are just some of the options available - for a few days, or a few months. So how on earth do you choose? Our volunteering helps you find your perfect placement.

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Volunteering travel guide

2 minute summary

As the gap between “vacationing” and “volunteering” decreases, the scope of volunteer projects is widening, encompassing everything from favela football coaching to diving threatened reefs, via elephant sanctuaries and rural clinics. The message is – anyone can make a difference, whether you’re 16 or 60, and whether you have five days or five months to spare. As placements have become more inclusive, however – with fewer skills and less commitment required from volunteers – so criticism of voluntourism has grown. With a huge number of organisations now offering “life changing” trips, it’s ever more important for volunteers to fully research the projects, to ensure that any transformational experiences are for the better – for the volunteers themselves, and for the people and places they aspire to help. Because as anyone who has done it can testify, a good volunteer experience, no matter how hard you work, will leave you feeling more relaxed, more inspired and with a hundred more stories than a traditional vacation ever could.

Read more about finding your perfect placement in our volunteering abroad travel guide.

What we rate & what we don't

responsible travel's best & worst of volunteering

Underrated

Marine conservation

Wildlife is not all about fluffy mammals. Marine conservation is on the rise – and with the chance to spend weeks living on a remote beach, nights patrolling for sea turtles, or hours underwater monitoring corals, these are some of the most diverse and worthwhile placements. Can’t dive? Many trips offer PADI certification as part of your placement.

Taste of volunteering

Vacation time is precious, and committing to two weeks of hard labour might be a bit much. But that’s where a taste of volunteering comes in. A day or two of your vacation can be spent on conservation activities or caring for rescued animals – or spend a week of a longer trip helping at a nursery or collecting data for marine research. You’ll learn about your surroundings – and decide if you fancy coming back for longer next time.

Matching skills

This is an essential yet strangely overlooked aspect of having a successful volunteer trip. You wouldn’t take over a classroom back home, so why volunteer as a teacher overseas? Using your skills – in healthcare, education, biology – or manual labour will mean you can actually achieve something worthwhile during your stay – which is better for those you’re helping, and will make you feel much happier, too.

Family volunteering

The benefits of volunteering as a family are vast. As well as spending quality time together without an iPhone in sight, your children will gain an extraordinary education from being immersed in a way of life entirely different to their own. They’ll get hands on experience of conservation – and learn firsthand about the threats facing our environment. And they’ll learn the value and pleasure of working – hard! – for a worthwhile cause.

Rated

Teaching & coaching

Teaching abroad takes many forms – from helping students practise their English, to teaching subjects that match your own skills, from science and art to music and conservation awareness. If you’re not a qualified teacher, you can work as a classroom assistant or help out with homework – or run sports coaching sessions or art workshops for kids. It’s the enthusiasm that counts!

Habitat conservation

Looking after animals in sanctuaries is all very well, but this is really just putting a sticking plaster on a wound. To reduce the need for sanctuaries, habitat conservation is essential – and the best thing is that these placements usually require few high-level skills. Fitness and a willingness to muck in are essential – as you’ll be planting trees, maintaining trails and fences or even monitoring the underwater world with diving expeditions.

Turtle conservation

It is said that seeing a huge turtle haul herself across the sand by moonlight to lay her eggs is one of nature’s most moving sights. Many sea turtle species are endangered – so the beach patrols, nest protection, hatchling releases and awareness sessions you can do as a turtle conservation volunteer are all vital to their survival. Plus, you’ll be living on some seriously gorgeous beaches.

Elephant care

The world’s largest land mammal has had a bit of a rough deal. Used in wars, logging and entertainment, as these have fallen out of favour, many elephants are now rescued or retired in sanctuaries across SE Asia. With huge appetites and in need of daily baths, exercise and clean enclosures, there is plenty of worthwhile work for volunteers, who can get up close to these gentle giants.

Overrated

Orphanage volunteering

Though this may sound like one of the most worthwhile placements, it is actually often the most harmful. A boom in volunteers – and the fees they pay – has made orphans something of a commodity, and there has been a sharp increase in the number of orphanages, many nothing of the sort. Plus, a revolving door of well-meaning volunteers means the vulnerable children are abandoned again, and again, and again…

Walking with lions

A photo of yourself feeding a baby lion will wow friends back home – until you realise what might happen to the cub once your safari is over. Habituated big cats can never be released into the wild, and when the cub gets too big to be safely handled it’s not cost effective to keep. To put it bluntly – there’s a good chance it’ll end up on a private hunting reserve.

Elephant trekking

Many so-called elephant sanctuaries are actually glorified circuses, where elephants paint, perform and carry tourists on their backs. Any sanctuary that promotes elephant rides does not have the animals’ best interests in mind; they will have been badly abused to persuade them to carry tourists. The placements available through Responsible Travel have all been screened for their commitment to animal welfare.

Boosting your CV

With the exception of longer term or highly skilled placements, volunteering should never be all about your CV. Roles can be challenging, satisfying, enjoyable – but the key question is not 'what will it do for me?' – but 'what will it do for others?' Projects must exist for communities, not volunteers; any valuable skills you gain will be a bonus – not the focus.

Why go on a volunteering vacation?

The most obvious answer to this question is – to make a difference. To improve the life of someone, or something, somewhere in the world, and return home with a bit of a rosy glow. Some people have a particular skill that they would like to share, others have a particular attachment to a certain corner of the globe and would like to give back.

But there are as many reasons for volunteering as there are volunteers. Some people are fed up of run of the mill vacations, and want something a little more challenging than basking on a beach. Others would like to pick up a new skill – whether that’s scuba diving or Spanish – and what better way to hone your talents than by putting it into practice straight away?

You may just fancy doing something completely out of the ordinary for a couple of weeks. You could find yourself living aboard a research ship in the Mediterranean, documenting whale and dolphin sightings. For something a bit grittier, head to a favela or township to coach football, cricket or martial arts – it’s a two way learning experience, as the local kids get to grips with a sport, and you’ll learn about life for the 99%.

Generally, we would discourage would-be volunteers from doing a placement purely to add to their CV – volunteering should really be about benefitting local people and places. However, there are certain skilled vocational placements, such as healthcare, teaching and research, where individuals, perhaps part way through their studies, can gain real-world experience while putting their skills to good use. And of course, skilled professionals are always welcome – such as teachers on long summer vacations, or corporate workers on a career break who can share their IT, marketing or startup knowledge with small businesses overseas.

Brief history of volunteering vacations

Traveling overseas to help those perceived as worse off than ourselves has a long – and always contentious – history, which can be traced back to missionary groups heading into the depths of Africa and the Amazon to convert and “civilise” indigenous communities, while bringing them western education, sanitation and healthcare. Read more ▼

Volunteer travel didn’t start out as a vacation – but as a chance to work abroad, often for an extended period of time. Projects were run largely by faith-based organisations or by governmental groups, such as the US Peace Corps, which dates back to the 1950s. In the same decade, the UK’s VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas) was founded, in which volunteers were given accommodation in exchange for their time. Both of these programmes involve a serious commitment, however, with most programmes lasting at least two years, and suitable only for skilled applicants. By the 1970s the concept of fee-paying volunteers began to take root, as the environmental movement grew and scientists realised that volunteer fees could help cover the cost of research – while unskilled volunteers could contribute much-needed labour.

By the 1990s, the “Gap Year” had emerged, as more and more young people took a year out before or after university, to travel the world before being tied down to full time jobs. Keen to capitalise on globetrotters able to spend an extended time abroad – and looking to gain work experience while they were at it – travel companies began offering “volunteer vacations” in exotic locations. These seemed to tick a lot of boxes, offering to boost the CVs of inexperienced undergraduates, while offering them a cheap way to stay overseas for longer – and give them the emotional boost of “doing good”. While some volunteer placements were of genuine benefit to local communities and wildlife, it’s also true that many of these opportunities were created by the travel industry (not NGOs, development professionals or the communities themselves) to fill a niche created by the gap year market. The impacts on the ground were questionable.

Today, it is accepted that good intentions don’t always equal good results, and while the industry remains unregulated, volunteers – and organisations – are becoming much more clued up about the pitfalls, and have begun asking many more questions – as have the media. 20 years into the voluntourism experiment we are able to see what has worked, and what hasn’t. Orphanage volunteering, for example, has proven disastrous in many regions, with orphans becoming a “commodity” and places such as Siem Reap – a town of 100,000 – now having 35 orphanages – an increase which directly matches the number of tourists visiting Cambodia.* These institutions are there to cater not for the town’s orphans – but for the endless line of fee-paying volunteers.

Other projects, however, have been a resounding success, with volunteers carrying out – and subsidising – essential data collection, restoring habitats, teaching English and, most importantly, funding local jobs as they go. The face of volunteering is changing too; as tuition fees rise and austerity hits the young hardest, the 20-year-old gap year traveler has been largely replaced by an older, more experienced volunteer – keen to share a lifetime of skills, make the most of an early retirement, or enjoy their independence once the children have left home. As organisations are under greater scrutiny to create genuinely worthwhile placements, so too the volunteers have more to offer. We think this change can only be for the better.