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 Eric Hartman shines light on the darkside of volunteering and voluntourism, particularly as the trend grows among young people taking a “gap year” between high school and university. Hartman calls for a human rights approach to civic learning in the United States to encourage young people not only to “do good” in the world but to recreate the world as it could be.