Learning Service: Read This Before You Volunteer Abroad
I’m asked almost daily by people hoping to volunteer abroad: “Can you give me advice on how to do it ethically?” And every time I try to answer this very complicated question simply, I find myself wishing I could hand them something and say, “Here – read this, before you even consider volunteering abroad.” Now I can.
The following is an edited extract from Learning Service: The Essential Guide to Volunteering Abroad, written by Claire Bennett, Joseph Collins, Zahara Heckscher and Daniela Papi-Thornton. It is the resource I have been wishing for, a sorely-needed primer for the many well-intentioned but unprepared volunteers traveling the globe. Reading this book felt like someone was writing down my own thoughts, condensing my years of experience in humanitarian work into the most important lessons I wish I’d known before I ever set foot on a plane. I yelled “Yess!” to empty rooms as I read and highlighted every other page.
I genuinely believe that no one should even consider volunteering abroad until they have read Learning Service cover to cover. To get you started, here’s an extract from the book for an idea of how the learning service model offers a guide for volunteering responsibly:
Learning Service in Practice
“The most challenging part was the result of the lack of learning I did before volunteering. I was a volunteer/intern in Uganda in public health with a focus on nutrition, yet I had no extensive background and experience in either subject…. I realized how important it is to know a little about the community, culture, and topic before entering a volunteer project.”
– Jeomar Montelon, volunteered for more than a month in Uganda
We are often asked about how the learning service approach is different from traditional forms of volunteering. It can be illustrated it by imagining the traditional model of volunteering as a person hopping off a plane in a foreign country and exclaiming: Hi! I’m here to help you!
Although the traveler might learn something along the way, the emphasis of this approach is on “taking action” first, which can be problematic. Imagine a typical volunteer, a student who arrives in Nairobi, Kenya to “help” by teaching children in an orphanage, but does not speak Swahili, has no experience as a teacher, and is not trained in how to deal professionally with the emotional problems of vulnerable children. This could also apply to a skilled doctor who arrives in Bhutan to work in a rural clinic, but is not accustomed to working without the technology he has at home, lacks the cultural knowledge to make patients feel comfortable talking with him about their sensitive medical problems, and has no background in the relationship between traditional healers and Western medicine in the Himalayas.
Clearly, taking action before learning in these cases would be ineffective at best, and possibly even harmful. And yet, this is the model that most potential volunteers have been taught to expect—a model repeated thousands of times each day as international volunteers arrive overseas expecting to get right to work and immediately be able to help.
Now imagine a second traveler who follows the learning service approach. This would look more like getting off the plane and saying: Hi! I’m here to learn from you about how I might be of help, now or in the future.
Reframing how you see your role as a volunteer will make your work more impactful and your experience more meaningful. I loved learning from my colleagues in Uganda.
The traveler’s role flips from “helping” right away to “learning,” which reframes their whole experience. This shift creates different power dynamics and different ways to measure success. In the learning service approach, we don’t assume that the people hopping off the plane have the answers. Instead, they have a chance to learn how they can offer effective help by learning from the only people who deeply understand the situation—the individuals who are affected by it. These individuals are the real experts on their true needs, and are the ones best placed to work for lasting change in their own community. Volunteers can join local people as effective advocates and allies, but only once they have put in the work to understand where and how their skills best fit.
In this second scenario, “taking action” is just as important, but what that looks like has not been fixed in advance. The second traveler doesn’t jump off the plane and start to take action in a place where the language, history, relationships, culture, and framing of the problems are all foreign to her. Instead, she acknowledges a need to start by learning, rather than teaching. She learns about herself, in order to understand her motivations and assumptions. She learns about the culture, the language, and the skills needed on her assignment—before she leaves home. Once she arrives, she looks to the local communities for knowledge on how and when she might be able to add value, and she is open to learning from them—including ways in which she can improve herself and her own corner of the world. She lets her learning inform her actions and realizes that the process of “serving” might take a lot longer than her trip abroad. She then integrates that learning throughout her life, staying open to self-reflection as she takes actions to do good in the world.
This learning service approach is better for both volunteers and hosts. The commitment to learning first and throughout makes for an engaging volunteer journey, as well as making the impact of the service more effective and sustainable. In our book, Learning Service: The Essential Guide to Volunteer Travel we assist you in applying the learning service approach to your own experiences—enabling you to take effective, responsible, self-reflective action, now and in the future.
Sounds good, right? It’s the way I wish I had approached volunteering from day one, instead of wasting years figuring all this out on my own. I know that anyone considering volunteering abroad is brimming with questions: Where should I go? What organizations are “good”? How can I prepare to be useful while I’m there? Is volunteering abroad even right for me?
The Learning Service book will walk you through the whole process, from start to finish. It will deliver some hard truths, and you’ll probably think differently about volunteering once you’ve finished it – at least I hope you do.
Learning Service: The Essential Guide to Volunteering Abroad is available to purchase online and in bookshops worldwide. You can also find out more about Learning Service from their website: www.learningservice.info or follow them on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
You Might Also Like:
This post may contain affiliate links. If you make a purchase through our links, we get a small commission at no cost to you. This helps with the cost of keeping this site running – so thank you for clicking through! Don’t worry, we won’t recommend anything we don’t fully believe in.
