Is 'voluntourism' the new colonialism?

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Is 'voluntourism' the new

colonialism?
Monday 24 March 2014 4:31PM
Saturday 5pm
Repeated: Wednesday 1pm

Presented by David
Rutledge, Margaret
Coffey, Gary Bryson and
Kerry Stewart

IMAGE: A YOUNG VOLUNTEER W ORKING IN GHANA W ITH THE ORGANISATION UBELONG. (UBELONG VOLUNTEER ABROAD;
FLICKR.COM/CC/BY/2.0 )

Volunteer tourism, or 'voluntourism', is one of the fastest

growing areas of the tourism industry. However new
evidence suggests that it may be doing more harm than
good in developing countries, as Kerry Stewart reports.

Poorly arranged gap year volunteering trips are at risk of becoming a new
form of colonialism, according to a new report by UK think tank Demos.
The UK has a long history of sending young people overseas to volunteer.
Operation Drake and Raleigh International, two adventure based
organisations took the idea of gap year tourism to the world. Now, it's almost
expected that Australian Gen Ys will take time off from their studies to spend
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Is 'voluntourism' the new colonialism? - Encounter - ABC Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

25/03/2014

some time working with children or helping to a school in the developing

world.
Volunteer tourism, or voluntourism as
it's called, is one of the fastest
growing areas of the travel industry
and while travellers' motivations may
be admirable, there's an unsavoury
underbelly that might not be so
obvious to every volunteer.

It's done for the

experience of the
volunteer. It's all about
the volunteer, with the
pretence of helping
someone, and I don't buy
it.

'Sending especially young people

abroad is important for peace in the
future, for global understanding for
ROGER O'HALLORAN, DIRECTOR OF PALMS
cultural awareness,' says Daniela
INTERNATIONAL
Papi, the co-founder of PEPY Tours,
an education travel company in Cambodia.

Papi thinks the positive aspects of volunteer travel are hindered when a group
of travellers believes it's their responsibility to fix the lives and communities of
another. She says that young travellers have good intentions, but what's
missing is a humility and thoughtfulness that acknowledges that they don't
know anything about the culture and language of their host country, and
what's been tried there before or who's leading the changes.
'It's done for the experience of the volunteer', says Roger O'Halloran, the
executive director of PALMS, an NGO that was born out of the Catholic social
movement of lay missionaries. 'It's all about the volunteer, with the pretence
of helping someone, and I don't buy it.'
The organisation sends its volunteers overseas for two years at a time.
O'Halloran worries about companies that send people away for short periods
of time (often a couple of weeks or even days) to build, say, a mud hut. Many
of the young volunteers would be going without building skills, which poses
the question of whether someone in that local community could do a better
job.
Jackson Fitzpatrick, a 19-year-old university student, grew up in a wealthy
suburb on Sydney's north shore and attended a private Anglican boys school.
Fitzpatrick says he realised he was 'living in a bubble' and decided to expand
his experience of life and share some of his gifts by volunteering in Australian
indigenous communities.
He says his motivation for volunteering wasn't his Christian heritage, but
rather a desire to understand indigenous spirituality. In the five months he
spent in three Northern Territory communities he was immersed in their
culture, learning about men's and women's business, sorry business, initiation
and kinship laws. He said the experience changed his life, and he plans to live
and work in the Top End after he completes his studies.

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Is 'voluntourism' the new colonialism? - Encounter - ABC Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

25/03/2014

Voluntourism

Saturday 22 March 2014

Encounter delves into the good, the bad, and the ugly
sides of volunteering overseas.
More

Roger O'Halloran says that PALMS is wary of people who want to volunteer
out of a sense of Christian charity because an inappropriate power
relationship can be formed between volunteer and host in which the giver has
all the power over the receiver. He says the way poverty is represented in the
media contributes to this separation between people.
According to O'Halloran, many volunteers think 'that's all they are, just poor
people, and I can help them by giving of my excess and that makes me a
good person'.
'[But] they are fellow human beings who have skills and capacities and
resourcefulness probably far beyond anyone living in a Western society.'
Daniela Papi has worked with hundreds of volunteers over the years she's
spent in Cambodia with PEPY Tours. She says there is a lot of discussion
about the need for skills when volunteering, but she would prefer to have a
person with the right attitude than someone with the right skills.
She describes the right attitude as a willingness to listen, learn, ask questions
and be willing to challenge some of the assumptions you have when you get
off the plane. It's also important to have a sincere desire to improve the world
and in doing that to improve yourself.
'I think that the key part to this is improving ourselves. Personal development
and global development are entirely linked.'

Find out more at Encounter.

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Is 'voluntourism' the new colonialism? - Encounter - ABC Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

25/03/2014

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Comments (1)

Add your comment

Doomsday Chook :
25 Mar 2014 8:17:33am

Improving the world is an utterly forlorn hope. The economic system is so savage, so firmly fixed
on increasing elite wealth and immiserating the rest (the OECD's latest 'Society at a Glance' report
reveals staggering increases in poverty and, particularly, inequality, worst in that capitalist
paradise, the USA, since 2008) that the puny efforts of bien pensants from the rich world are
rendered null in seconds. And that is not even to consider the effects of ecological collapse, now
rapidly accelerating.
Not that the efforts of these people are not praiseworthy, if properly motivated. To aid the billions
of victims of savage neo-liberal capitalism and Western fomented social discord out of human
solidarity and compassion is highly admirable. However, to do it to simply serve one's egoprojection in the sky, to proselytise for some 'God' or other, or to work for some interfering
Western NGO whose machinations are controlled, ultimately, by the US State Department or some
other Western organ of interference, is, I would say, thoroughly deplorable.
Reply

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