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.
In this blog post, Anna McKeon from the Better Volunteering Better Care Initiative, writes about her time as an inexperienced international volunteer in orphanages in Thailand and Kenya and shares the top five lessons she learned about volunteering and why it is harmful to volunteer in child care institutions.