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 post, the author poses the question “Does your trip do more to make you feel good than it does to actually do good?” The author goes on to explain why volunteering in orphanages is NOT in the best interest of children and asks readers to consider sustainable tourism instead.