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 Delia Pop, Director of Programmes and Global Advocacy at Hope and Homes for Children, poses the question “would you be happy for a volunteer, who has no experience and has undergone no background checks, to help out at your local school or nursery?” The post explains how volunteering with children in institutions does more harm than good.