How to choose a volunteering vacation

There are a bewildering amount of options for budding volunteers – and it may be hard to know where to start. But when thinking about how to choose a volunteering vacation, most placements break down into one of three main categories – animals, people and habitats. Within those areas, you’ll need to think about how hands on you’d like to be – do you want to have plenty of contact with the animals, or do research and monitoring from a distance? If you’re looking at community work, you may want to jump straight in and run some after school workshops – or stay behind the scenes and build a well. Your skills and previous experience will also shape the role you work in, and you’ll want to think about your living conditions – are you happy to rough it in a village hut with no hot water? Or would you rather retire to a comfortable guesthouse at the end of a hard day’s slog?

Finally – think about the duration. Generally, we’d encourage anyone working with people to stay a month or more, to give you the chance to build up relationships. Conversely, if you’re planting trees, it doesn’t matter if you stay a day or a month.

We’ve outlined our main placement types below, to help you decide how to choose a volunteering vacation.

“Wildlife conservation” conjures up images of bottle-feeding cubs and cuddling chimps – this couldn’t be further from the truth. Wildlife conservation volunteers should understand that protecting wild animals means keeping them wild. It involves conserving our natural environment and the wildlife that lives in it, something that is hugely vulnerable to harm by human activity. This in turn enables you to learn, spend time in the company of fascinating conservationists, and still have plenty of fun.

Volunteering with children can take many different forms, from assisting in a crèche in a Rio favela to reading to kids around Zambia on a book bus. The variety of placements means you can choose one which matches your skills and interests – with opportunities to teach, offer sports coaching or lead after school arts and crafts sessions. Those with more enthusiasm than experience can assist local teachers and care workers, chat to kids in English or prepare healthy food and help with homework. Placements last from a week up to several months – giving you plenty of time to make a difference to young lives.

Basic healthcare is something many of us have the luxury of taking for granted – but in developing countries, people are not so lucky. In remote areas facilities can be extremely limited; a situation compounded by a lack of sanitation knowledge and safe drinking water. These placements are ideal for medicine and nursing students to gain hands-on experience in their specialist areas; some are also suitable for unskilled volunteers who are able to offer basic sanitation advice, first aid or gather information on local health issues. Healthcare placements are hard work – but incredibly rewarding and greatly needed.

Sports coaching has a number of benefits for local communities. As well as promoting a healthy lifestyle, it gives often disadvantaged children a way to enjoy and express themselves – children who may not have had much of a childhood due to the need to work in the home or care for siblings. Placements for qualified coaches focus on a variety of communities, across slums and favelas, to isolated rural villages and refugee and immigrant communities. Coaching football in Brazil or cricket in India is sure to create memorable experiences – or you can try something a bit unusual, such as surfing, ballet or martial arts.

Becky Edwards, from our supplier Pod Volunteer, advises unskilled volunteers on how to choose a wildlife conservation vacation: “If you are an unqualified volunteer, it’s really important to establish that. You shouldn’t be doing a skilled role unless you have the skills already or are given them on arrival. In our projects, if skills are needed on the ground they would be included within our training. So in terms of looking at different options, one of the key things is to ask as many questions as possible. That’s key in terms of choosing the organisation, but also the project that’s right for you. They should be able to answer the question – if no skills are needed, then why? Why is that ok? That’s something we often get asked, and it’s not a problem as we pick projects specifically and find unskilled roles in places where that works. We wouldn’t work somewhere that it didn’t.”