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, under the hashtag #StopOrphanTrips. The campaign ends on June 1st, International Children’s Day, with a call to volunteer travel organisations to remove orphanage trips from their product offerings. Authors of these blog posts and articles urge people to sign the petition to put an end to orphanage volunteering. You can sign the petition here.
This post by Rebecca Nhep, ACCI’s CEO of International Programs, describes the ethical dilemmas involved with short-term volunteering, particularly volunteering with children, and how to apply child-centered ethics to short-term volunteer projects.