Lessons I Learned

I had meant to post this when I first commented on this blog, but then I guess I forgot.  Today I was speaking with someone about criticism in their business sector, and it reminded me of this posting. I think we should not be afraid when people criticize the sector in which we work if it is deserved in some areas because, if we continue to work to be the exception to the rule or the most responsible within our fields, criticism of the sector will not only help people to weed out those less responsible partners but help you distinguish yourself from “all the others”.

Below are comments I wrote on the Hands Up Holiday’s blog.  Chris, HUH’s founder, had posted a critical piece about voluntourism on his blog and his comments.  Chris had contributed his thoughts in the development of www.voluntourism101.com.  Here is his original post.

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I do though think all of you at Hands up Holidays ARE in the minority though, Chris, as it seems to me that most voluntourism organizations do not have close connections with the communities in which they work. Even though I too run a tour company which offers service learning options among other educational experiences, I do not take this sentence as offensive: “Fully trusting an unregulated, perhaps culturally ill-informed industry…”

Actually, I think it is a GOOD point. We shouldn’t fully trust this industry because, as you and I know there are a lot of entrepreneurial groups out there looking to make money off of placing volunteers, and many of these groups have have little to no care or in some case knowledge about placing volunteers in the RIGHT situations. Working with PEPY, our education program team gets call from these groups all of the time, looking to see if we want to take volunteers. Just last week I got an email from a group in the UK offering to send us volunteers to teach English at our school programs, and all we would have to provide is room and board. I went to their website and saw that they charge 6,000 pounds for the experience, and they expect us to pay food and board for a 17 year old with no teaching experience? Clearly, the answer was no thank you, in principle, and also because we don’t take foreign volunteers to work in our school programs.

The point, there are a LOT of groups out there who I would say are giving volunteer service a bad name and in some cases being blatantly unethical. I would encourage people to not “fully” trust this industry – actually – don’t trust ANY of us on first glance. Do your research, ask for references, read blogs like these, and the groups who care, are self-reflective, and are looking to learn how to offer the most positive travel experiences for the communities and programs visited will come to the surface. Skepticism is not a bad thing, in fact I think it will be good for groups like ours who are willing to discuss these issues and be critical about the mistakes we see and have made ourselves.

I think this is also why you and other contributed to creating voluntourism101.com – because we want to share our thoughts and learnings other operators but also with travelers to help them ask the right questions and find the best tour operators.

I will be putting this up on our blog as well this week and will link back here so that more travelers can read up on this as I think the more informed travelers are about the potential negative aspects of their travel choices the more thought they will put into who they choose to travel with. Thanks, Chris.