Lessons I Learned

I think that question is impossible to answer…. yet many people have asked me that or shared their answers with me.  Once again, I think the question is coming at this from the wrong angle.  WHO CARES how long the trip is, it is how the trip is designed that matters!

A two week teaching English trip is too short, in my opinion, if the volunteer is the students main teacher…. wouldn’t the ideal time be the whole year or semester?  But if the volunteer is coming in with a lot of skills and does a two hour training course for teachers on how to teach phonics to early learners, who is to say that is too short?  I think the voluntourism bubble is too big to try to put broad definitions around, but if we ask questions which are focused on community needs in each situation first, the “ideal” answers are very often different than the “ideal” answers from the tourist perspective.  Meshing those too, finding what realities are really possible, and arranging the most ideal volunteer/program match are the tricky steps anyone walking in the volunteer placement space must navigate.  I think we all know that it is not going to be “ideal” all the time – but we need to keep asking the questions to get closer as we learn what works and what doesn’t.

I added other thoughts about this here:

http://voluntourismgal.wordpress.com/2009/06/03/voluntourism-right-or-wrong/

Would love to hear yours!

vol⋅un⋅teer  [vol-uhn-teer] –noun

It would probably make a lot more sense if we stopped using the title “volunteer” for positions where people are getting paid.  The result is that I have met Cambodians who say “I want to be a volunteer when I grow up.”  Hmmm… do you think we are spreading the wrong message?  Volunteers in Cambodia are getting paid more than local staff.  I think we need to redefine this word.

Let’s get some misconceptions out in the open before starting to discuss “international volunteering” as there is a lot of confusion and sometimes a negative perception surrounding those words.

Some misconceptions are that: Continue Reading

This is a post I originally put on the PEPY Team Journal.
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What is this “sustainability” you speak of?  I do not think it means what you think it means.  This word is used so often now in development that it seems to have taken on a huge range of meanings.  Are we all spending too much time looking for an imaginary lost city and too little time focusing on other goals that increase the impact of our programs?  Has “sustainability” turned into the Holy Grail of development — promising that once you find it, your program can live forever? And perhaps the most important questions are, how is sustainability even possible and should it always be our goal?

Like any overused word, the answer to these questions depends largely on how we define it.  “Financial sustainability” is something people involved in any type of business can understand.  A business can be financially sustainable if the money coming in is equal to or higher than the money going out, and if the timing of those transactions matches up to allow the group to continue operating.  By this definition, sustainability would be the same for an NGO’s micro-loan program as it would for a Swiss bank.

“Financial sustainability” focuses on one variable — money — so it is easier to measure than sustainability in NGOs.  Merely taking into account financial factors in order to rate an NGO’s overall sustainability is too limiting.  Likewise, rating NGOs only by looking at their overhead to program budget is not a successful way to rank the “best” NGOs.  Both of these disregard the main reason NGOs (should) have been started in the first place: the “impact” of their work. (Note: For further disucssion of financial sustainability and how this relates to social ventures check out this posting).

For our own purposes of understanding the impact of our programs at PEPY and creating future plans of action, we needed to do two things:  1) decide how to measure the “sustainability” of our programs, and 2) decide if/when “sustainability” defined as such should indeed be a main goal for each program we offer.

In order to facilitate this discussion with our staff, Continue Reading

In a post by my friend Paco, who works for Better World Books, he questions what BWB’s role can be as a social venture working to improve literacy globally.

I added some thoughts here as well.

http://donniya.blogspot.com/2009/10/books-for-africa-literacy-in-africa-and.html

I recently went to the BWB office in South Bend, IN and was SO impressed with the team I met there and what they have accomplished in the last 6 years.  Very impressive people with a great idea!

I wrote a guest blog post for Canada’s adventure couple, Dave and Deb about voluntourism, why I work, in part, in this field, and some ideas for how we can improve what we do.

For those who don’t have time to read the whole post, here are the five key areas I would consider when choosing  philanthropic travel provider:

1. Is the travel company transparent about how much of your tour fee is going to the programs you are supporting?  Is there marketing consistent with the itinerary they are offering?  (As with the above, I don’t think length of time nor percentage of funding going to a project is a determinant of if the project is good or not. A tour company can be very responsible if none of your funding is going to support projects, if that is clear from the start, as long as the program is design responsibly.)

2. What interaction with children is included in your itinerary?  Is the interaction described like a visit to the zoo?  Are there child protection policies in place?  If it was YOUR child, would you be ok with the type of itinerary an interaction being offered?

3. How does the travel company choose the programs they support?  Ask questions about how your time and any additional support offered by the company itself is designed and what monitoring they do on the impact of these programs.  How is the community or NGO partner involved in designing the programs?

4. Are you giving things away (school supplies, food, wells, etc) on your tour?  How are the recipients chosen?  Is the program designed to help empower people to be able to improve their own lives, or a small bandaid to a larger problem?  If the item is something that will need repair in the future, how is that being dealt with?  Is there community ownership built into the project plan?

5. What about the REST of the trip?  There is so much focus on volunteer interactions and donations as a key to improving the impact of tourism, but perhaps the best way we can improve the impact of tourism is in the “everything else” category.  How does the travel operator choose their hotel partners/travel operators and how do they work to both support the local economy and improve the overall impact of their tours?

Hopefully thinking about these things will make us all better prepared to pick the best partners for our future travel. To read the complete checklist please, visit Voluntourism101 website.

I added my thoughts to this on-going  debate here, on voluntourismgal’s blog:

http://voluntourismgal.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/tax-deductibility-and-voluntourism-should-it-stay-or-should-it-go/

What do YOU think?!  Add your thoughts too!

I saw this as my friend Jordan’s status on his gmail account today:

“Today, educational funding favors programs that teach kids how to read, rather than why to read.” 

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112312561

and i wanted to pass it on because it relates a lot to the work PEPY is doing.  When we decided to partner with a large education NGO here – we took a similar argument line “Why are you only training people how to take care of books and where to put them on a shelf?  Instead – let’s teach a LOVE of reading, and then the books WILL get taken care of!”   We have found, in our library programs, that teaching “reading skills” was less effective at getting students to check out books and read in the library than teaching that “reading is fun and that there is a world of learning available IN books”. It is very sad that in America we too are forgetting this: a love of books and a desire to read will be the biggest incentive to learning to read.  Structured phonics time might be needed too, but I don’t think one should be in place of the other.

My mother is a first grade teacher (the best in the world, in case anyone is wondering), and she has seen a huge decline in the freedom teachers have to create FUN in the classroom.  She is one of the reasons I too believe that the biggest incentive for being a good learner is the DESIRE to learn.  We can’t foster that desire to learn unless we focus on the interesting and fun side of learning equally as much, if not more, than the technical skills taught in schools.

What do you think?! 

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112312561