Portugal

In this post, the author explains that when families volunteer at, or visit, orphanages, “rather than setting a good example for their children, parents are helping to perpetuate, and sometimes aggravate, serious problems.”

This article from the Telegraph refers to an interview on BBC Today with Dave Coles, Coordinator of the London School of Economics Volunteer Centre. The article shares Coles’ remarks from the BBC interview on how volunteering helps fuel the problem of family separation in the developing world.

This episode of BBC Today Radio features an interview with Dave Coles, Coordinator of the London School of Economics Volunteer Centre, who wrote a piece as part of the Better Volunteering Better Care Initiative’s month-long spread of articles aimed at raising awareness around the issues of orphanage volunteering.

This post is part of the Better Volunteering Better Care Initiative’s month-long spread of articles aimed at raising awareness around the issues of orphanage volunteering. In this post, the author explains why Unquote Travel does not offer orphanage volunteering or orphanage tourism trips.

Providing educative help at home means that professionals have to enter into the intimacy of families and share daily tasks often for a long time. Family support workers spend many hours alongside parents, helping them with their domestic and parenting tasks. 

Jo Boyden, professor of international development at Oxford University and director of its Young Lives study, has selected five books that challenge Western assumptions and beliefs about child-rearing and how children “should” be raised. 

The London School of Economics Volunteer Centre and the Better Volunteering Better Care Initiative have collaborated to develop a pledge that can be adopted by universities and other institutions of higher or further education. By adding this pledge to their websites, universities and other supporters promise not to advertise orphanage volunteering trips to students and to “endeavour to ensure that such opportunities are neither facilitated nor promoted within our institution.”

This post is part of the Better Volunteering Better Care Initiative’s month-long spread of articles aimed at raising awareness around the issues of orphanage volunteering. The post calls on universities around the world to stop promoting orphanage volunteering and offers some steps that universities can take to help put an end to orphanage volunteering.

Gerald Campbell, a man from the state of Texas in the US who managed an orphanage in Malawi, has just pleaded guilty to sexually abusing the children in his care at the institution. 

This post is part of the Better Volunteering Better Care Initiative’s month-long spread of articles aimed at raising awareness around the issues of orphanage volunteering. In this post, the author shares her personal experience as an orphanage volunteer draws attention to the “well-disguised human-trafficking” of orphanages.