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?”
