This is a multifaceted discussion, and this post would get boringly long if I tried to hit every point. In some parts of the debate, bloggers have treated volunteerism as a sort of systemic problem in the world of international aid and development. There's a better way to look at this issue!
Let me persuade you:
Several questions make up the core of the discussion:
What is volunteerism? Why do people volunteer? Are volunteers useful, useless or downright harmful to the orgs where they work? What are the defining relationships between volunteers, paid workers, amateurs and professionals? Why do orgs offer volunteer positions? And, as Crystal Hayling of the Center for Effective Philanthropy puts it, “Whose Volunteer Experience is this Anyway?"
In asking that last question, Hayling was asserting that volunteering should be an altruistic pursuit.
“It is not about you!” she imagined exclaiming to her friend who had planned a volunteer outing to Cambodia with her teenage kids, only to have the locals thwart their good time by taking leadership in a construction project away from the (oh so construction savvy?) teenagers. The kids were disappointed and turned off by volunteerism after the experience.
To Hayling, the idea that the kids would want control and decision making power in their volunteer experience indicated that something was wrong. They should have been doing it to help the locals, not for themselves.
I doubt anybody has ever embarked on a stint of volunteering with purely altruistic motives. Volunteer positions frequently offer perks like travel to distant lands, interactions with exotic cultures, and in a time of rising unemployment (in the U.S. anyway), something to do for a few months while you’re jobless anyway. The question that comes to mind is “what’s wrong with volunteering because of the benefits you can reap?”
It is a category mistake to say that volunteers do what they do for any one reason. Clearly, a panoply of motives, emotions and circumstances affect anyone’s decision to volunteer, and it is likely that a mix of selfish and altruistic reasons are included. As for wanting to have influence, and to gain personal enjoyment from a volunteer stint… why not? Not being paid money for a job doesn’t mean you aren’t being compensated. Whether you get personal gratification by “doing something good,” or you love the people in your office, or you get to travel a lot, the non-monetary rewards for volunteerism need to be enough to compensate you for the difficulties of doing it. It is, ultimately, a transaction. You have to decide whether the benefits outweigh the costs.
Professional aid workers, at least the ones who blog, don’t like it a bit when volunteers, or the reviled voluntourists, get self-satisfaction or an ego boost from having “helped someone,” when they haven’t actually done so. The idea that someone can “do volunteer work” at a vacation destination, to offset their guilt about having time and money to vacation in the first place, is understandably annoying. Voluntourists don’t deserve to feel good about the pittance of amateur work time they’ve donated to some cause, right?
Why not? They still spent the money to get to the destination. They probably spent a bunch of money on food and smarmy t-shirts while they were there. If they’re getting a disproportionate amount of glee from having “volunteered” when what they really did was take a holiday…so what? There are plenty of real volunteer positions for the people who want them. Voluntourism orgs serve a different market.
Some of those debating this topic have argued that people who volunteer are inexperienced, and can’t help the organizations they work for. Volunteer positions often last only a few months, and don’t allow time to sink your teeth into helpful work, especially if cultural acclimation is also a factor. Most volunteers probably are not highly qualified professionals in their field. If they were, they could do the same job, help the same number of people, and get paid for it. The distinction between amateurs and professionals, and the value of amateurs as aid/development volunteers is hotly debated.
When I decided to volunteer for Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) for 11 months, I applied for, and was awarded, a position as a photographer/storyteller for businesses operated by ex-sex workers in Bangladesh. I am qualified for that position. Visa complications arose, and I was forced into a quick pivot that landed me in Nepal as a Peace Promotion Program assistant, a position for which I am less qualified. The fact that I still took the job proved that I wasn’t just doing it because there was a perfect position for me, but for other reasons as well, some of which I am conscious of, some less so. However under-qualified I am for my current position, I’m certainly not harming the org I work for. When I can help (which is often enough), I do, and when I can’t, I stay out of the way. I’d wager that most volunteers who end up in positions for which they aren’t qualified behave similarly, and therefore aren’t a threat to the success of aid/development work.
Domestic and international aid and development efforts constitute a global industry. As altruistic as we wish it could be, this industry too sways under complex motives and influences. MCC has an annual global budget of $80 million, a relative speck compared to some larger INGOs’ bankrolls. A lot of that money comes from donors, and when people donate money, they want to see it spent in a way they deem appropriate.
This gets closer to a central kink in the development/aid system right now. Donors frequently have a different idea of how good development/aid work happens than actual orgs. Therefore, NGOs are in the undesirable position of needing to show their donors “look at all these good looking projects we’re doing and these needy children we’re helping,” at the same time as they do the unphotogenic and boring work that actually leads to progress. Inexperienced volunteers and amateurs who think they can single-handedly save the world are created by this system. By always publishing the romantic, adventurous and exciting side of development/aid work, NGOs attract volunteers (and paid workers, for that matter) who are looking for adventure. In order to keep bringing in the volunteers, the NGOs are under pressure to alter the volunteerism experience to match the unrealistic expectations of the volunteers. There is a constant tug of war between the industry of volunteerism, and the industry of development/aid. Not to say the NGOs shouldn’t publish the fun stories. That’s what organizations do. But just as advertisements for soft drinks create an unrealistic idea of the social benefits of consuming said drinks, the public relations materials published by NGOs show an unrealistic vision of how thrilling it is to volunteer for those NGOs.
A corollary to this problem is created by the inherent PR value of development/aid work. It looks good to do development/aid work, and if you’re a celebrity who controls your own publicity machine , you can bask in the glow of dev/aid PR value whether or not you’ve contributed to any problem-solving. This is the tendency of non-celebrities involved in dev/aid as well. If you volunteer time for any reason, you want your choice to look as good as possible to your peers. You blog about exotic experiences, not about the days you’ve spent doing desk drudgery. If you help people, and can truthfully explain how, you benefit from that. You also benefit by being able to show off your rad experience to your friends on the Internet. Those are separate benefits.
So instead of looking at volunteers and amateurs as problems in the development/aid system, and instead of being angry at non-development workers for reading pop-aid lit, let's consider “volunteerism/voluntourism” and “development/aid” to be two different industries, with different underlying motives, and different benefits for different people. The two clearly intersect, and we can work to make that intersection more positive and beneficial for all parties involved.
If you want to be a real dev/aid volunteer, possibly as a precursor to becoming a professional in the field, go into it with realistically humble expectations about what you’ll accomplish and how exotically fun it will (or won't) be. If you want to visit a cool place and maybe do a little work while you’re there, that experience is also available. Being honest with yourself about what’s actually important to you is the first step toward ending up in the right place, for the right amount of time, doing what's right for yourself while helping (or at least not harming) someone else.
A special shout out to Claire Bryant, another MCC volunteer who alerted me to the existence of almost all the blogs I linked to in this post. She blogs too!
I don't think I wrote a paper that good in my entire college career. Lot's of thought-provoking material
ReplyDelete@Merle Agreed, seconded.
ReplyDeleteRE: "I’d wager that most volunteers who end up in positions for which they aren’t qualified behave similarly, and therefore aren’t a threat to the success of aid/development work."
I trust that you're way more plugged into this situation than I am, but it's hard to believe that the average volunteer is able to reach such a thoughtful perspective on their work. Given the public image of the volunteer experience, how do you not end up with a glut of world-saving teenagers and celebrity do-gooders?
I suppose that there must be an equilibrium of story-worthy self-betterment and measurable progress within any org's volunteer experience to be sustain long term interest in the work...
Also, the captcha I had to type in to post this was "olargo." FYI
I agree with much of your analysis, although I do think there is also a category of volunteers who do go in with a lot of experience for a certain job that they could be getting paid for, yet they’re willing to do it as a volunteer because of (once again as you named it) the benefits they receive from it. Maybe it’s religious motivation… Selfish gain in their work place? Adventure? Break from “real life”? Something to do with the family? But once again, as you said, there are alternative motives in volunteering because why would anyone do it if it wasn’t a tiny bit for themselves, too? And I too don’t think there is anything wrong in going into the work a little bit for your own gain because I think that’s what makes a person even more motivated to be there. No one is motivated when they work somewhere that they feel they’re getting no experience from. We’ve seen plenty of those kind of people in dead end jobs who seem to lack all gumption for life. Who would want a volunteer like that? Then again, who on earth would volunteer if they would feel like that? As you said: A person must get something, whatever that is, out of the volunteer experience to make it worthwhile.
ReplyDeleteThere is definitely a difference between “good” volunteer/development/aid work organizations and “bad.” I don’t really want to get into that, but we all know the organizations that go into the tiny villages of Zambia and throw out clothing and U.S. dollars to the kids screaming on the sides of the roads. That is not good volunteer work. Although it may feel good to the white kids sitting in the van throwing out the cash and clothes, they don’t see the repercussions of what they’re doing—how the kids argue over it, how there is no personal connection to the people who gave it to them, how they have an impression of white “Americans” and they form an idea or definition about them based on this impersonal free-loving from a car window. I could go on and on… but yeah, there definitely is a difference in how organizations handle volunteer/development/aid work, and the kind of emphasis they place on their volunteers for what they should be doing in the places they’re at., and I do think there is a right and wrong way, although the line is a bit muddy.
Thanks for such a thought-provoking entry Chase. (This is Lisa, a 2011 SALTer in Laos) (oh, and sorry that I am over a month late in reading it! just found that I hadn't read the mid-term email you sent out!)
ReplyDeleteI've always been really interested in how the development/aid industry tries to balance the well-intentioned motivations and interests of privileged Westerners with actually doing good, locally-driven work. Volunteerism is definitely a huge part of how these globally altruistic intentions are being used by development orgs. Unfortunately, I think there can't be any hard and fast rule about its benefits or harm. Like you said, every volunteer program/opportunity and every volunteer comes with different pros and cons. However, it is an area of international relations that is only growing and needs to be thoughtfully considered, as it relates to development and as a "voluntourism" industry in and of itself.
Thanks for throwing your thoughts out there on the blogosphere. We should definitely have a SALTers chat about this at...re-entry retreat! See you then.