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 and move beyond any training you might need. 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.

Volunteering with children can take many different forms, from teaching swimming to kids in South Africa to reading to sports coaching in Australia. 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.

Habitat conservation vacations are amongst the most flexible and require few skills – just about anyone can get involved, for as long or as little as they want. Conservation takes in landscapes from the Amazon rainforest to the Scottish Highlands, and the work involved is just as varied. Tree planting, forest maintenance, surveying, species identification and trail maintenance are just some of the tasks that volunteers can take part in, alongside skilled conservationists. Even a couple of days as part of a longer vacation can make an impact, as there is no need to build relationships with a community or learn about animal welfare; this is highly recommended if you want a taste of volunteer life.

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.”