Inspiring Stories

Ruthie, who is studying International Development at the University of Sussex in the UK, first experienced the pull of volunteering during her high school years. Her initial excitement soon turned to doubt and concern as she dug deeper into what would be involved in the four-week trip, which included spending time in an orphanage. She decided there and then she would not go. 

"I completely understood why my classmates wanted to go - essentially it was a low cost holiday to Bolivia, helping supposedly some of the poorest children in the world, and a promise to enhance your CV and gain valuable experience...as time went on I began to realise that this once in a lifetime opportunity for Western pupils is by no means a once in a life-time opportunity for the children in these orphanages."

Five years on and Ruthie dedicates her time to advising fellow students who are planning to volunteer overseas to think carefully about their intentions and the potential impact - positive and negative - they could have on the local community. 

Read Ruthie's journey to becoming a voluntourism cynic

When Eliza was a teenager, her dream was to volunteer in orphanages all over the world. So when she turned 18, she packed her bags and headed to Guatemala to volunteer in an orphanage. Her first task was to sort through a container of goods that had been donated to the orphanage from the USA. Inside the container was a pair of snow skis. She remembers realising in that moment that she was a bit like the skis: very well intentioned, but not much use in the context of a Guatemalan orphanage. At the time, she spoke very little Spanish and had minimal experience working with children.

This was when she first started to become aware that making the world a better place through orphanage volunteering was more complex than she had anticipated. Fast-forward a few years and Eliza carried out her Masters research looking into best practice in volunteer tourism, worked for a volunteer-receiving organisation in Peru, and then worked for a volunteer-sending organisation in New Zealand. During this time, she placed many volunteers in orphanages. 

In 2013, Eliza stepped away from her work in voluntourism and co-founded GOOD Travel with three other women from Peru, South Africa and USA. They wanted to offer an alternative to voluntourism for people seeking to have a positive social, economic and environmental impact on the places they visit. Through GOOD Travel's work with ChildSafe and Rethink Orphanages, Eliza and the GOOD Travel team have come to understand the importance of taking a pro-active approach to child protection.

So 18 years later, Eliza's dream has changed: from wanting to volunteer in orphanages all over the world to wanting to help end volunteering in orphanages. Through GOOD Travel, she will be sharing the volunteering checklist from ReThink Volunteering and encouraging all GOOD travellers to watch The Love You Give. She believes that the key lies in empowering travellers and tourism businesses to slowly and strategically find alternatives for supporting marginalised children and their families.

One of our partner organisations and creator of the orphanage volunteering alternative Rok Kern programme, Children in Families was invited to speak about volunteering at an International School in Phnom Penh.



Following, this one student, Annie*, shared her thoughts in a blog about the 'buzz' you get from volunteering in an orphanage. She invites other volunteers to think beyond the 'buzz' to consider the emotional impact on the children and to channel their good intentions and excitement about volunteering into being catalysts for change.  



"The important thing to remember is that someone else is the recipient of those emotions. That feeling of joy and bonding that is felt when seeing children’s’ faces, upon learning their names, the children feel that too. And then that connection is torn away after a week, perhaps a month – again, and again, and again. A year later, it is doubtful that volunteers will remember their names, their faces. By then, the “buzz” has faded. Perhaps their eyes were opened, perhaps it influenced the way they saw the world. But the children left behind? They remember the visitors, as they remember the others – the ones who left."

Read Annie's* full blog post on Children In Families' website. 

*Names have been changed for privacy reasons

Orphanage volunteers may have the best of intentions - but they may unwittingly be doing more harm than good, as one ex-volunteer discovered. 

At the age of 17, the idea of volunteering in an orphanage seemed like a rewarding, ethical and helpful thing to do. She found an organisation to travel with and booked on a trip to Kenya.

Looking back, she now questions the ease at which was able to sign up to volunteer in an orphanage, and the unsupervised access, without any child protection checks, to vulnerable children. Today, she feels that her trip was  form of exploitation - not just of the children in the orphanages but herself - and her good intentions - too. 

Read this former orphanage volunteer's full blog post on Lumos' website. 

If you’ve watched The Love You Give, you’ll recognise Peter Kamau and his gorgeous son Jedd, who featured in this docustory about orphanages.  

Following the death of his parents and separation from his siblings, Peter was raised in an institution in Kenya. The experience had such a profound effect on him that he co-founded Child In Family Focus, an organisation which champions family based care for orphaned and vulnerable children. Even though Kenya now has a moratorium on the registration of new residential care institutions, the country remains one of the most popular destinations for orphanage volunteers. 

Peter’s message to people who want to support children in Kenya is not to volunteer in an orphanage but to direct efforts in ways that will help to alleviate poverty,keep families together and support alternative family care placements for abandoned children whose families or origin are unknown and cannot be traced. 

As he explains in The Love You Give, the main reason for children to be placed in an orphanage is poverty with parents struggling to make ends meet. Even for a child whose parents are deceased, there are often relatives who could care for the child, enabling them to stay in their own communities, rather than a childhood spent in institutional care.  

“Families need to be empowered so that they can sustainably care for their children,” says Peter. 

Peter’s work with Child in Family Focus is concentrated on reducing Kenya’s reliance on institutional care, working with the Government Department of Children’s Services and other child protection stakeholders to encourage the use of family-based care options such as kinship care, foster care and adoption.  

Find out more about Child in Family Focus.

Foster care is changing the lives of vulnerable children in Bulgaria. When Renetta met her foster child Ronie*, who has cerebral palsy, the girl had spent most of her young life in an institution. At age six, she could not walk and could barely talk. 

In just one year, the change in this tiny, sunny girl has amazed everyone around her, her potential unlocked by the love and care of a family environment. 

Renetta and Ronie were brought together by Lumos' partner For Our Children Foundation, a non-profit child protection organisation and the leading provider of foster care in Bulgaria since it's establishment in 1997. The foundation continues to support them both, and Ronie makes new progress every day. 

Read the full story and watch a video on Lumos' website. 

A volunteer shares her experience of volunteering in an orphanage in Haiti, where, she says, she witnessed children intentionally malnourished in an attempt to motivate visitors to the orphanage to donate more - which was at least $350 per visitor.  

She describes how children were force-fed pig feed and deprived of love and one-to-one attention - whilst western donors raised money for projects for the orphanage and sent money and goods to the orphanage director, which were simply sold on at the local market. 

You can read the full story via our partner Lumos