Since starting this blog and advertising to my friends and acquaintances about my upcoming volunteering adventures I have received several inquiries into the process I have used to locate and contact grass roots organizations with whom I could participate in an international volunteering experience with my child. I completely understand the inquiries – until just last summer my explorations into this were being met with a distinct lack of success also. Google searches on “international volunteering” typically resulted in pages of listings of larger coordinating organizations whose set programs were primarily oriented towards gap year students and younger adults. Those organizations which did offer family programs did not have the flexibility, length, or affordability I desired and/or required. So what do to? Well, fortunately, I learned a few things during my residency program at Royal Roads University in addition to the course work that were very helpful in this regard.
Most
importantly I learned that many grass roots organizations are very appreciative
of family involvement. My first contact
individual, Derek Koch (contact) of Imagine Thailand spent an entire year volunteering
with his family in Thailand. He is happy
to discuss his experiences as well as family volunteering possibilities with
those who are interested.
Next
I learned that one can contact grass roots organizations directly, and talk to
them like people, to make arrangements suitable for you as an individual (or
individual family). The experience does
not have to be as rigid as what might be implied through the websites of those
larger coordinating organizations.
Armed
with increased motivation from the new knowledge that many grass roots
organizations are not just accepting, but actually enthusiastic, about
receiving families as volunteers, and the knowledge that many are open to
direct discussion of arrangements tailored to each volunteering group, I
renewed my investigations. This time,
however, in an effort to reach directly to the small grass roots organizations,
I altered my search strategy somewhat. Instead
of using search strings like “international volunteering”, I used strings like
“volunteer teaching in Takua Pa Thailand”, and, eventually, since cost was a significant
factor affecting my ability to participate, I started adding a “free” to the
front of that search. This strategy
produced much better results for what I was wanting, but I was somewhat limited
in that my ability to search was dependent upon my knowledge of where
opportunities existed, as well as what types of opportunities existed, which is
problematic when one is starting out!
Fortunately,
adding the “free” term resulted in the appearance of a new sort of coordinating
organization in my search results – ones that serve as a listing site for grass
roots organizations offering low-cost opportunities for international
volunteers. One of my favourites is http://omprakash.org/volunteer-abroad . With access to these websites I now had the
final tool required to engage in effective, systematic, investigation of grass
roots international family volunteering investigations, which is the process I
will describe now.
Before
getting into this, however, I will issue a warning. This process, of investigating and locating
an organization with which to volunteer, can be quite lengthy and time
consuming. So be prepared. But, it is also rewarding, and
educational. And, you’ll find something
suitable to you and your family, both in terms of budget and type of
involvement. The old adage, you get what
you give, applies here.
So
where to start? First, ask yourself, what
is it you are wanting to get out of this experience? Why are you looking into this? Is it for travel, experiencing a different
culture, contributing to places of need, a desire to broaden your children’s
minds? And then, how do you think this
can be accomplished, in a way that is enjoyable for you and your family, and
safe? You may not know the answer to the
last question, likely you don’t, otherwise you probably wouldn’t be reading
this. You may not even know the answer
to the first question, or if you do, it may be rather vague. That’s okay.
Everything starts with an interest.
Now we are set to pursue it. And
to start with this, we need information.
We need to know what is available.
And then we can come back to those questions and look at matching what
is available with what our goals are. So….
how to get the information?
This
is one of several areas where those free volunteering coordinating sites are
extremely useful. Looking through their
listings gives a person a good idea of what types of opportunities are
available and where. Many of the
organizations which list on these sites also maintain their own websites, if
you find something that might interest you I would recommend searching for the
organization’s independent website and reading through their information in
addition to what has been posted on the coordinating site websites. The
coordinating websites will typically provide information on the general
orientation of the grass roots organization, type of volunteering experience
that could be expected, living conditions, costs, and general expectations of the
volunteer; the grass roots organization’s website will provide more details on
the nature of the organization, their needs, volunteering opportunities,
usually photos, and often times postings from previous volunteers. This more detailed information will give you
a better idea of opportunities that might exist with that organization. This stage is a learning stage to find out
about the variety in types and locations of experiences available so that you
can better answer those questions posed right at first and thus have more
success finding an opportunity suitable to yourself and your family, so try not
to be too restrictive in which organizations you explore further.
If
as you go through you are interested in discovering more about the conditions and
issues in a particular location, (which I would recommend), one can always
check out travel websites for that particular location. I would especially recommend investigating
weather and living conditions.
Accessibility might also be a factor, a general idea of the cost of
airfare can be attained either through airfare search websites such as Kayak or
Orbitz, or, to find local carriers, googling flights from your origin to your
destination. I would suggest using more
than one of these methods to get a more accurate estimate. It is also highly relevant to become somewhat
familiar with social conditions in the areas, Human Rights Watch maintains a website http://www.hrw.org/with easily
accessible current and past reports, searchable by country, as well as a
current news feed http://www.hrw.org/news . Googling for
local newspapers (you can restrict by language), or even a generic “current
events in …” for reports by international newspapers, can also be informative. This process can be especially enlightening
not just for the adult but also for any somewhat older children who are going
to be involved, even if you do not end up visiting that particular region of
the world.
During
this information gathering stage keep in mind that just because an organization
does not say they welcome families doesn’t mean they don’t. Many organizations are fairly flexible and
when the time comes to send out preliminary contact e-mails one might find
there are far more opportunities available than what was explicitly posted on
their or the umbrella site’s websites. Especially
for teaching and orphanage help positions I found the organizations quite
welcoming of myself and my son. Of
course, he is 13 and old enough to help out, so I do not know what the response
would be to bringing, say, a 3 year old.
But I do recall reading some previous volunteer experiences which
mentioned being there with their young children.
As
you become more familiar with the types of opportunities around, and the
terminology frequently employed, you can try doing your own independent google
searches, which, as I mentioned, tend to provide results with more grass roots
organizations (although do keep in mind that “more” is relative).
This
is a long process, so be sure to bookmark the places you find. There is nothing more frustrating than
remembering, right!, there was that amazing sounding orphanage in Uganda that I
wanted to look at further! and having to go through the whole search process
again. Remember as you go along that
this is a long process, keep your patience, and eventually you’ll gain a pretty
good idea of the variety of opportunities available, which are of most interest
to you, and some ability at finding them.
As
you proceed through this learning and familiarization stage take the time
occasionally to sit back and ask yourself those questions I posed at the
beginning, again. What do you want to
get out of this experience? Has this
changed now that you have further information?
And now, given what you have learned, how do you see your goals
potentially being accomplished? Eventually
you will have garnered enough information to be able to pinpoint a little better
a few volunteering areas, both experiential and physical location, in which you
are most interested. You will have
enough knowledge of factors which differ from organization to organization, such
as accommodations, costs, and time expectations, to have questions about
these. It is at this point that you are
ready to move on to sending out some preliminary contact e-mails to the contact
people of the grass roots organizations themselves, starting the next stage of
this process. Congratulations! So sit back, take a bit of a rest, and wait
for my next posting on the topic….
