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 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.
The post from Travel + Social Good describes some of the voluntourism industry’s “initiatives that are based on good intentions, but can be more detrimental than helpful for local communities.” The post highlights orphanage tourism, or orphanage volunteering, as one such practice. The post explains that most children in orphanages have living relatives who could care for them and asks readers to reconsider supporting institutions that keep children from their families.