This article from the Telegraph refers to an interview on BBC Today 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, 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.
The article shares Coles’ remarks from the BBC interview on how volunteering helps fuel the problem of family separation in the developing world. “People who run orphanages are going out to very poor areas and convincing families to put their children into the residential care system on the promise on Westerners and foreigners coming to teach them.”