Voluntourism/Volunteer Vacations

Ask care providers of chronically sick children or adults how they are coping, and Kathryn Berry Carter bets that they will say they are tired, stressed, and worn out. During her tenure as the Volunteer Services director of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Berry Carter has witnessed first hand how caring for someone with complex medical needs can be tough physically and emotional.

Berry Carter often wanted to find an efficient way for hospital volunteers at St. Jude to help parents get a meaningful break. For years, she notes, “we limped along, providing some respite care for pre-scheduled needs.” In the fall of 2010, Berry Carter’s team became determined to take a hard look at this logistical challenge and to find a way to fix

In this article for e-Volunteerism, Berry Carter explains the steps she took at St Jude to implement a thriving and successful on-demand respite care program, one that has become an integral component of St. Jude’s family-centered care approach. Though the article mainly discusses respite care in a children’s hospital, Berry Carter describes how the same principles can be applied to respite care in settings ranging from senior nursing care facilities and Alzheimer day care facilities to hospital organizations and other pediatric programs.The St. Jude experience can be replicated in any of these settings, notes Berry Carter, who also provides tips on implementing any pilot program that explores new roles for volunteers, regardless of theme. 

A significant area of growth in recent years has been the phenomenon of 'voluntourism' – traveling somewhere on vacation but using the time to engage in some type of organized volunteer project.  In this Keyboard Roundtable, we seek to find answers as to why this form of volunteering has become so popular, what it takes from volunteer management to coordinate this effort and the potential for even further growth in the future.

This “Along the Web” feature explores one of the most rapidly developing subcultures in volunteering – combining travel with service. Originally called ecotourism, it is now referred to as vacation volunteering or voluntourism -- a word which has even made its way to the Macmillan English Dictionary Word of the Week.
 
Why help out in your own neighborhood when you can save the world, literally? 

The real question is whether this will become a source of competition for local volunteer activities.  After all, when faced with an alternative like “Help Save a Penguin on Your Next Vacation,” what chance does a child at risk really have at attracting volunteers?
 
See Steve’s annotated list of resources in these three categories:

• Research and scholarly articles
• Examples of volunteer vacations
• Web sites assisting in scheduling volunteer vacations

The growing trend called "volunteer vacationing" reflects the increase in short-term and family volunteerism reported in national surveys in the United States. An increasing number of organizations, public and private, cater to these volunteers with packaged service trips. Drawing on current research into the characteristics of successful volunteer programs, this article offers some preliminary hypotheses about the motivations of volunteer vacationers, the benefits and drawbacks of the "volunteer vacationer" model, and the ways in which programs can take advantage of this trend. Organizations welcoming volunteer vacationers have surmounted some difficulties shared by many volunteer programs, including how to balance a volunteer's need for intrinsic and extrinsic rewards, how to train and manage large numbers of short-term workers, and how to minimize staff resistance in the process. We would be well served by learning more about these effective programs. The rewards may include healthy retention rates among volunteers who are willing to pay handsomely for the experience.