By Claire Bennett, Learning Service
Claire lives and works in Kathmandu, Nepal, and freelances as a trainer and consultant. She is passionate about global education, ethical travel and ensuring good intentions are put to good use. Claire recently released her book: Learning Service: The Essential Guide to Volunteering Abroad.
The much-debated topic in volunteer travel is “to pay or not to pay”. On the surface, paying a fee to volunteer can seem like a contradiction in terms—if you are already offering your time for free and covering your expenses, why should you also have to pay? However, the learning service approach emphasizes that you, as a volunteer, are a major beneficiary of the process.
Volunteers are not free—it takes a lot of time, capacity, and money to create and support a great volunteer experience. The costs might include marketing and recruitment costs for the organization to attract the right volunteers, staff to vet partners and provide pre- and post-placement support, and all the in-country costs of hosting volunteers.
One volunteer hosting organization said, “Initially volunteers didn’t have to pay anything, but we realized after a while that this was limiting the organization in terms of how many volunteers we could host as we couldn’t meet their costs. Volunteers now have to pay a small contribution for the accommodation that they stay in (this doesn’t actually cover the full cost and is far less than rent in their own country), and a one-off contribution that goes towards the costs of recruiting and hosting them.”
The biggest piece of advice that we have at Learning Service is to find out how the volunteer fees are used. Fees may go to the sending organization to cover the costs of placing you in a volunteer role, to the local organization directly to host you, or both.
The fee may include a charitable donation for the cause you are volunteering to support. It may also include a large profit margin for a company. A downside to the spread of fee-charging placements is that unscrupulous organizations take on more volunteers simply for financial gain, even when there are no roles for them.
So in addition to finding out where your funds are going, ask questions to find out if your role really is needed. When you have the answer and the fee breakdown, you can reflect on the value for money it represents and your opinion on the ethics of the income distribution.
There are ways to volunteer that do not require a placement fee. Some matching portals intentionally do not exchange money with hosting organizations in the belief that this helps ensure that volunteers are valued and needed, and not relied on to generate funds. Some of the larger government-funded or faith-based organizations cover volunteer expenses or even provide a living stipend.
If you do not pay a volunteer fee, think about who is subsidizing the costs associated with your placement. It may be you, taking more time to research and set up logistics yourself, or the organization overseas might be taking on extra costs because they need your skills.
Being aware of all the resources and time that go into your volunteer placement and how those might be covered will help you make the right decision about whether to pay a placement fee or not.
A final word of warning: it is not the case that the more you pay, the better quality the service. We spoke with many volunteers who paid a lot of money for their placement and ended up dissatisfied, often because they had assumed that their money was going towards things that it was not.
Not all fee-charging placements have effective policies for selecting partners or matching needs, and not all of them offer much support for volunteers or for partners. Sometimes none of the money you pay even reaches the country where you volunteer.
The bottom line is that good organizations, for a fee, can do a lot of the logistical legwork required to provide you with a positive experience, while the worst organizations might take your money in profit and yet still leave you in a disorganized and poorly planned volunteer placement.
For more information about volunteering, visit
www.learningservice.info
☛ Read more: Volunteering – Serious questions to ask yourself
Claire lives and works in Kathmandu, Nepal, and freelances as a trainer and consultant. She is passionate about global education, ethical travel and ensuring good intentions are put to good use. She is co-author of Learning Service: The Essential Guide to Volunteering Abroad.