Hi everyone! With so many companies around offering volunteering placements overseas, I was just wondering: how many of you thought it was fair to have to pay for the opportunities they have available?

Here's the basic problem: Unless you have a highly specialized skill and/or plan to stay for a year - you cost the agency money. Period. Money they COULD spend on their services to people in need.

If you don't have a specialized skill - a local person would be happy to have that job - and they don't need special housing and someone to look after them and translate for them what needs to be done. They already know where to go and what to do to get things done.

I spent two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Africa - and was pretty well accepted that no one becomes efficient or useful until they had been on site for about six months. It was certainly true for me.

Most of us would hope that the money we donate to service agencies gets to the people who need it - and not that it is spent on people who want a "feel good" experience for two weeks or even two months.

I live on Phuket and people want to come here to volunteer all the time - for two weeks - and want free housing and free food.

How can any agency provide that without spending their hard to come by money - that could be spent on the people in the area? Westerners are soft and want comfortable housing - food they recognize - someone to translate and transport them - maybe even meet them at the airport and tell them how wonderful they are for volunteering. These things cost money.

Also - think about and wonder if you are displacing a local person who could do the job you are volunteering for - much more effectively and at lower cost. And - feed their children in the process.

Even when I was in the Peace Corps - there was talk that the country I was in was using PC teachers (I wasn't a teacher) to relieve the teacher shortage and keep wages low. No PC teachers and they would have to pay the local people more to stay in teaching rather than heading off to jobs that paid better.

Hopefully, you see that this is a complex issue - and not just about providing an "experience" for a Westerner.

Very interesting and valid points made by Ted. Beyond the self-serving free room and board crowd, many westerner’s over value the contribution they can make to most projects. (E.g.: just because you are paid $10/hr back home doesn’t mean that ‘value’ translates into $400 of benefit for the charity if you work a week.)

I am personally hostile towards the pay-to-volunteer concept because it seems more of an industry supplying the demand for people who want to volunteer rather than the need for services by the target population/cause.

There are a few types of charities that can benefit from unskilled, short-term, no overhead (R&B, etc.) volunteers…like animal vaccination and castration projects. (Some of us on BnA have successfully worked on such projects) But they don’t have an advertising budget, frequently do not even have a web site, and one must proactively find them.

I also agree with Ted's comments. Most countries don't have a shortage of unskilled labor....which is what you would be unless, as he suggested, you have some specialized skill. The economics has to work for the organization(not just you). Otherwise they are not using their donations (or government funding) wisely.

I look at most of the pay-to-volunteer type trips as a way that you can have a cultural experience that you could not create on your own. Some organizations have effectively used these types of trips to create awareness of the need and the efforts of their organization.

I have personally done some of this kind of travel and would do it again with the right organization. I also volunteer with an organization that pays my expenses if I travel but it is only US travel. But I have spent numerous hours of my time taking their training classes and volunteering locally.

So if your motives are truely charitable I suggest either volunteering in your own back yard or making a donation to an organization (cash or paying all your expenses if you are volunteering abroad).

It might be naive and too simplistic of me to suggest - but I think that if you just get yourself somewhere and start chipping in with the work - that is just as valid. No?

After the tsunami that hit Phuket I went to the local hospital and just started helping out. Sometimes just simple things like getting water to people - or whatever I was asked to do.

They hadn't had time to organize for volunteers. They were overwhelmed - patients needed attention - not volunteers.

Take out the garbage. Clean the bathroom. Greet and direct if you know the language - stuff that would release the more skilled people from the press of mundane tasks to focus more on their charge. Don't expect people or resources to be diverted to take care of you - and try to NOT do something that takes a job away from the local folks.

Programs where you "volunteer" and get to wash an elephant and other silly things - aren't really volunteer programs - they are paid cultural experiences. No different than going river rafting really.