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, published on Epicure & Culture and on RethinkOrphanages.org, offers a “non-traditional perspective” on orphanage volunteering. The author, Stephen Ucembe, grew up in an orphanage in Kenya and has since gone on to found the Kenya Society of Care Leavers. He describes his experiences with international volunteers in the orphanage where he lived and the larger problem of orphanage volunteering.
