Lessons I Learned

Since the end of last year, I have been part of a team of four authors working on a new book about “Learning Service”. Yesterday we launched a campaign to raise funds for the publication of both the book and the second half of an educational video series we’re working on…. so if you are interested in pre-ordering a copy of the book (!!! !!!), please click here.

For the last few years, the PEPY Tours team has been promoting a concept we call “Learning Service”. It is based on the key lesson we learned in our work in Cambodia: you have to learn before you can help. Though PEPY Tours started via a volunteer trip in 2005, since then we have shifted PEPY Tours from volunteering (“Come help in a place you might have never been before!”) to “service learning” (“Come help in a place you might have never been before, and yeah, you will learn a lot!”) to “learning service” (“Come meet people in a place you might have never been before, learn from THEM, and they will give YOU the opportunity to learn how YOU can be of service, now and in the future”).

Last year we worked on a Learning Service charter and guidelines, which are designed to help would-be volunteers make responsible, informed choices about how they donate their time. This year, we decided that if the concept was going to get more wings, we’d need to move it out of the PEPY Tours umbrella.

We’re now working with other advocates for development education, researchers, designers, and authors to build a wider movement around the Learning Service concept.

I was lucky enough to be contacted by Zahara Heckscher and Joe Collins, who had co-authored a book about volunteering more than a decade ago. They were interested in writing a new book about volunteer travel, and invited me to join them, and lucky for all three of us, we were able to convince Claire Bennett, to join us )with her many years of development education work from leading a DIFD project to add development education to the UK curriculum to leading the creation of PEPY Tours development education toolkits). Together, the four of us have been working on this book, along with a handful of other experts who are lending their contributions to this how-to-guide for responsible international service.

In addition the PEPY Tours team have completed three out of five videos for our soon-to-be-released Learning Service video series and just released the beta version of a Learning Service website (www.lessonsilearned.org). We need to raise more funds to bring the book, website, and video series to completion, so if you are interested in sponsoring a video, buying a book, or donating to our efforts, we’d be so grateful! The fantastic people at KEEN & Eagle Creek have also donated some fantastic gear to sweeten the pot – so check out our Indiegogo page if you are interested in learning more.

I’ll be following up in the coming weeks with little bits of the book, a general overview, as well as chance for anyone interested in or working in volunteer/educational travel to give us feedback on our thesis/organization of the book to make sure we’re not missing anything before we wrap it up.

In the meantime, check out this fantastic video made by Luis, Dur, and Sarah of the PEPY Tours team, and please pass it on to others if you like it!