At school meeting two weeks ago, Director of Global Programs Ms. Ashley Sinclair announced the study-abroad trips that will occur this spring. One trip in particular furrowed at least a few brows in the student body: a community service trip to Oaxaca, Mexico, which, to more than one student, appeared to promote the unsettling phenomenon known as “voluntourism” — a relatively brief overseas service trip. The phenomenon isn’t exclusive to Choate: many organizations fly volunteers to foreign countries, where they construct a building or two, play with local children, and depart — pausing only briefly, if at all, to consider the trip’s larger implications.
Voluntourism and other acts of international service can, indeed, have positive impacts on communities, even if some underlying motivations feel less than ideal. Serving abroad allows volunteers to learn about new cultures, exposing them to issues beyond their standard bubble. This exchange of cultures goes both ways, as the locals living in communities abroad are also exposed to other parts of the world, despite, maybe not having the opportunity to travel themselves. And it is undeniable that volunteers often do accomplish what they set out to — whether that be painting a classroom or teaching a primary-school English class.
And yet many observers have pointed out that these impacts are often short-term and can even harm the very communities they are supposed to help. Critics of voluntourism worry that travel-based community service programs, especially those that work with orphanages, exploit impoverished children’s financial situations to fulfill their growing flow of volunteers. In a 2012 article for the Huffington Post, Daniela Papi-Thornton, then the deputy director of England’s Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, reported that voluntourism in Cambodia was “spawning some horrible orphanages, fueling the separation of children and parents, keeping kids out of school to entertain tourists and aiding corruption by adults who are using these children to profiteer, all in the name of ‘service.’” According to UNICEF, 75% of children living in Cambodian orphanages have at least one living parent.
Moreover, is it healthy for children to live in a place constantly cycling through volunteers? This sets up a situation for children to become close with a volunteer, perhaps even regard them as family, only to have them flying back home in a week or so. A 2013 report in the Scientific World Journal found that children living in areas where short-term volunteers come and go frequently develop attachment disorders.
A related cause for concern was sparked during Community Service Day earlier this month. A few students in each group were assigned to take photos at their service locations. These photos later appeared on Choate’s Facebook and Instagram pages, which provide to prospective students and alumni, among other constituiences, glimpses into life at Choate. While all of this reinforces support for community service at Choate, and provides a record for the good work the students have done, such documentation of service, especially to the scale Choate did during Community Service Day, can make the labor feel less about service and more about our school. Despite what the old saying preaches, if there’s no picture, it still did really happen.
This problem exists, too, on a larger scale: when voluntourists go abroad with large, powerful companies, they often return from service trips with heartwarming, social media-ready photos. This hints at corporate marketing rather than true, selfless community service. As journalist Tina Rosenburg put it last year in The Guardian, “The newest trend is corporations sending employees to volunteer. It’s a team-building exercise and associates the brand with good works.”
Perhaps volunteer efforts can use their power to help advocate for the establishment of non-institutionalized child care programs, as J.K. Rowling did when she established the non-profit Lumos Foundation, which aims “to help the eight million disadvantaged children in orphanages around the world to be returned to their family or placed in a loving family environment.”
The amount of money institutions spend traveling to and from volunteer locations could also be donated directly to charity organizations, allowing communities to make more informed, efficient use of those funds. This would also leave the jobs that many volunteers pursue, such as constructing buildings or supporting children, to locals. For example, if ten students travel to Oaxaca, at least $230,000 will be spent, considering the baseline cost is $2,300 per student and at least ten students will be travelling. This is money that could help an Oaxacan construction worker earn a better wage, supply the salaries of more than one new teacher, or help initiate a project to address the larger issue of child care and education in the area.
Choate is distinctive in its concentration of globally-aware and passionate thinkers; we are a community that has the potential to defy voluntourism and make change more lasting than a one-week trip. But instead of “sympathetically volunteering,” a term Ms. Papi-Thornton coined in a TEDx Talk titled “What’s Wrong With Volunteer Travel,” students should “empathetically learn.” They should aim to better understand the culture, structure, and underlying struggles of a community, and they should use that knowledge to develop a plan for sustainable, targeted initiatives. And, rather than engaging in one-off acts of service, they should seek to establish continued engagement with a community, which is more beneficial to both the community and volunteers’ understanding of their global citizenship.
