http://www.whydev.org/whats-wrong-with-development-volunteering-rating-systems/?utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer&utm_content=buffer4b6af

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ashoka/2013/05/15/can-marketing-your-social-impact-harm-your-social-impact/

http://voluntourismgal.wordpress.com/2013/05/08/attention-all-phd-masters-thesis-voluntourism-researchers/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniela-papi/ngego-the-waste-we-cause_b_3188945.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22294205

There are a ton of comments on it already…. clearly this is a nuanced issue – where certainly not all “voluntourism” is good, but just as certainly, not all of it is horrible. I do advocate for a “guilty until proven innocent” approach to donating time and money to non-profits, as I feel that generally there isn’t enough research going into the donation or volunteer travel decision making, but that doesn’t mean I think all NGOs are bad. I just think that, if you have good intentions and you want to do go, it is really important to then do research to make sure your time and money are indeed being used as a force for positive change, rather than the opposite!

If you want the LONG version of my thoughts (and those of the other three co-authors), the Learning Service team and I are working on a book, designed to help people more effectively navigate their decisions when considering volunteering overseas.  Our Indiegogo campaign is live here, if you want to pass it on!  Thanks!

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/improving-volunteer-travel-through-education?c=home

Tune in tonight for the talk, if you are interested!

For the last few years, the PEPY Tours team has been promoting a concept we call “Learning Service”. It is based on the key lesson we learned in our work in Cambodia: you have to learn before you can help. Though PEPY Tours started via a volunteer trip in 2005, since then we have shifted PEPY Tours from volunteering (“Come help in a place you might have never been before!”) to “service learning” (“Come help in a place you might have never been before, and yeah, you will learn a lot!”) to “learning service” (“Come meet people in a place you might have never been before, learn from THEM, and they will give YOU the opportunity to learn how YOU can be of service, now and in the future”).

Last year we worked on a Learning Service charter and guidelines, which are designed to help would-be volunteers make responsible, informed choices about how they donate their time. This year, we decided that if the concept was going to get more wings, we’d need to move it out of the PEPY Tours umbrella.

We’re now working with other advocates for development education, researchers, designers, and authors to build a wider movement around the Learning Service concept.

I was lucky enough to be contacted by Zahara Heckscher and Joe Collins, who had co-authored a book about volunteering more than a decade ago. They were interested in writing a new book about volunteer travel, and invited me to join them, and lucky for all three of us, we were able to convince Claire Bennett, to join us )with her many years of development education work from leading a DIFD project to add development education to the UK curriculum to leading the creation of PEPY Tours development education toolkits). Together, the four of us have been working on this book, along with a handful of other experts who are lending their contributions to this how-to-guide for responsible international service.

In addition the PEPY Tours team have completed three out of five videos for our soon-to-be-released Learning Service video series and just released the beta version of a Learning Service website (www.learningservice.info). We need to raise more funds to bring the book, website, and video series to completion, so if you are interested in sponsoring a video, buying a book, or donating to our efforts, we’d be so grateful! The fantastic people at KEEN & Eagle Creek have also donated some fantastic gear to sweeten the pot – so check out our Indiegogo page if you are interested in learning more.

I’ll be following up in the coming weeks with little bits of the book, a general overview, as well as chance for anyone interested in or working in volunteer/educational travel to give us feedback on our thesis/organization of the book to make sure we’re not missing anything before we wrap it up.

In the meantime, check out this fantastic video made by Luis, Dur, and Sarah of the PEPY Tours team, and please pass it on to others if you like it!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniela-papi/social-fiction-muhammad-y_b_3070491.html?utm_hp_ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false