Volunteering Abroad is the dream of many and a lasting experience that you will never forget. Volunteering Abroad is a win-win situation for everyone, you will not only help a community but you will also further develop your professional and personal knowledge. So there are many advantages if you do volunteer work abroad.
However, if you start looking for volunteer work abroad on the internet, you will quickly fall back on the costs involved. Sometimes you pay several thousand euros in advance for a month and that without your flight tickets, visas and other matters. These initiatives that take all that money out of your pockets continue under the name voluntourism.
Facts about free volunteering abroad
Free volunteer work Abroad is never free
Free volunteering abroad shouldn't just be free for you. When you volunteer, you give, your time and your knowledge, for free. After all, the idea behind free volunteering is that you give your time, experience and other positive points without getting anything in return, so no compensation under the guise of accommodation, food or plane tickets.
Keep in mind that if you were to receive natural compensation, you would be an extra person that an already struggling community would have to pay for.
Most volunteers have no problem paying for their lodging and transport as long as these costs are not sky-high or have to pay upfront to participate in a project.
With Volunteer Abroad Alliance you pay all costs related to your volunteer work personally on site to the person who organizes it, we have a transparent operation.
Is free volunteering abroad possible?
If you search the internet, you will definitely find offers where you get many benefits if you do volunteer work, often under the guise of accommodation or meals. We already wrote above that free volunteering abroad is never free, so we certainly recommend looking at these initiatives from different angles.
Be careful with these initiatives, because they often concern commercial organizations that charge their target audience, to whom you offer your services.
There are many private schools that use volunteers to teach leaving a local teacher out of a job simply because that foreigner is an extra marketing trick, moreover it is not certain that this foreigner has the same knowledge as this local teacher. Another sector that likes to offer free volunteering abroad is the tourism industry, after all it is very easy to offer vacant rooms to volunteers in exchange for their services, but even now the local community is left empty-handed.
The idea behind free volunteering abroad is that you are helping a community and not a private initiative. After all, as volunteers you are something extra for the community and not a replacement.
You can also look for an organization locally that will give you something in exchange for your volunteer work, but even then you have to pay attention to whether it is not a tourist initiative and to view the initiative from all angles here too.
How do the projects get funding?
That's the great thing about it Volunteer Abroad Alliance, the goal of all the member organizations of our alliance, is to help a community. Volunteering is a tool to achieve these goals and not a fundraising activity.
The first focus of the participating organizations is to recruit and seek sufficient funds to carry out the projects. Unfortunately, these are not always sufficient and therefore volunteers are an additional resource. Should we find sufficient funds and budgets, we would like to use a local employee instead of a volunteer.
Free volunteer work abroad is possible
Above we wrote about the various pitfalls to watch out for when doing free volunteer work abroad.
As you can read on our transparency page. We have no problem if you want to volunteer elsewhere, after all our mission is to help as many communities as possible, even those who are not part of our alliance. If you are unsure about an initiative, be sure to contact us and we will let our specialists from that region assess the initiative, you decide whether or not you follow the advice. Isn't that awesome?
