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, Juno Kim describes the shock of learning that most children in “orphanages” are not orphans and offers a brief explanation as to why that is and what happens to those children. The post includes a list of ways in which people can help address the situation.