Peace Corps and Bonnie Lee Black have something in common: age. Peace Corps celebrated its 51st anniversary in March this year; Bonnie was 51 when she closed her catering business and joined them as a volunteer in the thickly rain forested interior of Gabon, Central Africa. That was back in 1996. Bonnie was then on the leading edge of a surprising shift in volunteering, not only within Peace Corps, but in many volunteer sending organizations as Baby Boomers eschew outdated stereotypes about aging and throw themselves into post-retirement full-time volunteer service.

‘You may have youth on your side, but I’ve got skills and experience on mine.’

Even though overall rates of volunteering continue to fall for the Baby Boomers as they age (a normal part of the volunteer life-cycle that I’ve blogged about before), there is an absolute increase in older Americans volunteering abroad. A whole cottage industry has sprung up to cater to short-term senior volunteers abroad. (see here and here and here!) Higher end voluntourism operators owe a good part of their growth and success to these aging adventurer volunteers. (Of course, there are also growing domestic volunteer programs like Senior Corps aimed at connecting older volunteers to worthy causes.) In many ways this is not surprising; Baby Boomers have more money, time, and health to travel abroad then previous aging generations; they are mindful about giving back and leaving a legacy; and they are educated and armed with a range of applicable skills that many younger volunteers simply don’t have. And this last point may be the most important one in terms of changing what volunteer service can look like.

Peace Corps volunteers 60 and older have more than doubled in the past three years. Just this month an 81-year old man completed a 27-month service assignment in Ukraine! Peace Corps Director Aaron Williams says that all Americans can make an impact in a developing country at any stage in life. “Older Americans bring tangible skills, professional development and life experience to their Peace Corps position in a community overseas. I encourage Americans to consider serving with the Peace Corps at any age.” Deputy Communications Director Kristina Edmunson was interviewed by AP reporter Melissa Kossler Dutton for a piece published by ABC News titled ‘Not Your Grandma’s Peace Corps? Well, It Can Be‘. She told Melissa, “It’s a natural fit. Older Americans who serve with Peace Corps come with a wealth of life experiences, creativity and professional development that can help make an instant impact in a community overseas.”

At 57, Tamara England-Zelenski (also profiled in the ABC News article) may be better fit for Peace Corps than she was when she first considered volunteering in her early 20s. “I had considered Peace Corps when I was in my early 20s, but I felt that I had no specific skills to offer, other than speaking French. I figured they wanted specialists and I was a generality, so I never applied. And I’m still a generalist, but one with a lifetime of experience in different areas and businesses.”

This is mostly good news for aid elitists who rant against sending young unskilled volunteers out into the world armed only with good intentions and a spirit of adventure. As Bonnie says, “I hope and pray other people don’t let themselves be sidelined. Don’t think it’s over at 50-something or 60-something. The older we are, the more we have to give back.”

LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network released the results this morning* of a survey of nearly two thousand professionals in the U.S. and found that 89% have volunteering experience, but only 45% include this on their resumes. This is a mistake according to Nicole Williams, LinkedIn’s Connection Director. ”Professionals often have the misconception that volunteer work doesn’t qualify as ‘real’ work experience“. But, 41% of the surveyed professionals stated that when they are evaluating candidates, they consider volunteer work equally as valuable as paid work experience. In fact, 20% of the hiring managers surveyed agree they have made a hiring decision based on a candidate’s volunteer work experience. According to Williams**,

“Given the current economic climate and the hyper competitive job market, it’s essential to include your volunteer work on your profile. Even if you’re currently unemployed, you can still actively volunteer and begin to accrue new skill sets. When hiring managers or business partners are comparing two people side by side, volunteer experience makes you a more multifaceted professional and can set you apart from competition.”

Volunteering is Good for Your Career

Again, according to Williams, there are at least four ways that volunteering can be good for your career.

Helping others counts – All that time you spent raising record amounts of money, the year-end event you planned to perfection all felt like real work and…it was. New research from LinkedIn shows that one out of every five hiring managers in the U.S. agree they have hired a candidate because of their volunteer work experience. Your volunteer experience counts and if you don’t include it in your profile, on your resume and as a discussion point during an interview or when you’re negotiating for a promotion you’re not getting the credit you deserve.

You Never Know Who You’re Going to Meet – The majority of career enhancing opportunities come through relationships and volunteering exposes you to people you wouldn’t encounter otherwise.  And get this: volunteer relationships are particularly beneficial in that folks you interact with while volunteering are usually driven, conscientious professionals who can be a referral. Volunteering offers a whole new world of qualified and valuable connections.

Test-Drive Your Passion – A truism of career success is that passion correlates with talent and talent translates to reward (both financial and emotional).  One of the safest ways of test-driving your passion as a career is to volunteer your talents.  Not only do you get to try your hand at a repertoire of new skills and experiences in a low-risk forum, but you’ll also be showcasing these talents to a whole host of peers who may just happen to have the connections you need to get hired.

Get Noticed / Motivated  – The most successful people in the world dedicate their efforts to a cause that extends beyond themselves and your boss and / or hiring manager are well aware of this. In this hypercompetitive world of work where we all need to differentiate ourselves, volunteering not only provides you the opportunity to showcase your talents and experiences, but it also allows you to demonstrate compassion and commitment.

Now You Can Make it Part of Your Profile

LinkedIn also announced today that members can add a ‘Volunteer Experience & Causes’ field to their profile. To add the “Volunteer Experience & Causes” field to your LinkedIn Profile:

• After logging in, click “Profile” at the top of LinkedIn.
• Click the “Add Sections” hyperlink.
• Select “Volunteer Experience & Causes.”
• Click the “Add to Profile” button and then fill out the applicable fields.

Here’s what the new section looks like on my profile: Aaron Ausland

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* I am timing this blog post to coincide with the official press release of this information from LinkedIn, who was kind enough to share their results with me last week as a blogger who occasionally writes about volunteerism. To see more posts related to this topic, select “Volunteerism” or “Voluntourism” from the Categories drop box on in the right-hand column.

** Nicole Williams is also a best-selling author of Girl On Top: Turning Dating Rules into Career Success.

The Volunteer Life-cycle

This morning I was reading the just published Volunteering in America 2011 Research Highlights, and they were talking about this very topic – Generation X and its volunteering rates. Like me, they celebrate the  increased rate of volunteerism among members of my generation.

“Once stereotyped as skeptical and disengaged, Generation X is showing signs of optimism that they can make a difference in their communities through service as they become more connected to local networks through their careers and their children. Gen X members have more than doubled their volunteer rate between 1989 and the present day.”

I'm just now peaking in my volunteer life-cycle, so be nice.

They didn’t stop there, though. They went a bit deeper and brought up the “volunteer life-cycle”. The graph below, taken from this report, shows that volunteerism rates are higher in the teen years than in early adulthood, then they start to pick up in the early twenties and peak in the middle age (35-44 year olds), then they drop off again as age increases. So, it should be no surprise then that Generation X (people aged 30-46) are increasing their rates of volunteerism over other generations that are in a declining stage of the volunteer life-cycle.

To really be the “heroes of American volunteerism” as I claimed yesterday, the Gen Xers would have to show that they’ve somehow ridden their volunteer life-cycle better than the other generations. Let’s look at the data. Now, the graph is actually not very intuitive to read, and the data doesn’t really go back far enough to be super useful, but I’ll walk you through what I read in this. Back in 1989 (the red line), when I was 16, others about my age were volunteering less than people did when they were 16 in surveys taken before and since. Thus the whole “skeptical and disengaged” reputation we acquired about that time when the term “Generation X” was first popularly used to describe my generation. (Douglas Coupland’s seminal book Generation X was published in 1991.)

So, my generation started with a volunteerism rate much lower than other generations. What has happened since? Fast forward to 2010 (the light blue line). Now members of Gen X are between 30- and 46-years old. We’re no longer the cohort on the bottom at this age. The lowest line for this age range is still red, representing those that were of this age back in 1989. This would be tail end of the Baby Boomers. (Did mention that this graph is not very intuitive for what we are trying to read from it?)

Conclusion

So, when we take just a snap-shot of the present (the graph from my previous post), Gen X looks awesome, the only generation increasing their rates of volunteerism. But when we take into account the “volunteer life-cycle”, we see that every generation goes through the same pattern, it’s just our turn to be peaking because we’ve reached that certain stage in our life when all generations volunteer the most. When you compare the trajectory that we’ve taken with other generations, the most striking element is the low starting point of our generation – the disengaged slackers that we once were. But, also striking is what we’ve done since. We have, in essence, redeemed ourselves, volunteering in our middle age at rates similar to other generational cohorts, even more so than the Baby Boomers did when they were our age.

So, maybe we aren’t the heroes as I claimed earlier, but maybe we are. Yeh, we started off as slackers, but we pulled out of it, learned how to hope, and got engaged. That sounds pretty heroic to me.

We know that people volunteer when they have both the heart for it and the resources for it, but which resource is more important, time or money? I would have thought that time would be the critical resource. This feels like the case for me anyway – the limiting factor on how much volunteering I can do tends to be busyness. But, then again, I’ve mostly been gainfully employed when not a full-time student or a full-time volunteer. But here’s some interesting data that has me thinking today.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics the current US unemployment rate is around 9.1%. But we know this figure is a pretty flawed measure for a number of reasons I won’t get into here. The statistic I like to follow is the civilian labor force participation rate, which stands now at about 63.9%. This is a measure of everyone of working age that is either actively employed or seeking employment. It doesn’t include students, retired people, stay-at-home parents, people in prisons, informal workers, or people who have given up looking for work. So, this means that about 36% of the working age population is currently not working or looking for work. This isn’t to say that these people aren’t busy – but perhaps they are less busy than those working full-time. So, since this figure is at currently as low as its been in the past 30-years (because the participation rate is near a 30-year low), one might think that working-age Americans have more time on their hands than usual.

So, given that (1) there are a lot of Americans suffering in the current economy (2) both State and Federal governments are pulling back resources from social programs, and (3) it would appear that Americans have more time than usual to volunteer, should we expect to see rates of volunteerism up? Let’s look at the data.

According to Volunteering In America, the number of volunteers nationwide dropped last year by 600,000 to 62.8 million. The national volunteer rate now stands at 26.3%. We can compare that to 28.8% from 2003 to 2005. In other terms, there are over 2.5 million fewer Americans volunteering today than just six years ago.  What’s going on? Do people volunteer less when they are unemployed?

Again, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they don’t. In a report released earlier this year, between 2006 and 2010, employed people volunteered at a rate 6-7 percentage points more than unemployed people. So, we shouldn’t be too surprised then when we see rates of volunteerism falling as unemployment rates increase.

Generation X – the heroes of volunteerism in America?

Now, just for fun, I wonder what the picture looks like when we look at volunteerism rates by age group.  As expected, the rates of volunteerism among retired people are stunningly stable over the past decade. But if we look at who is volunteering less among the working-age population, the picture is really quite interesting.

The baby boomers, approaching retirement are volunteering less. The Millennials, striving to establish themselves in the workforce, are volunteering less. But, we of Generation X, in the prime of our working years, are volunteering more.

It seems that the Millennials are hit hardest by rising unemployment rates – they have the least experience. It seems the Boomers are also getting it a bit rough as some are induced to an early retirement – they cost the most to keep employed. But the Gen-Xers seem to be losing their jobs at a slightly slower rate than these – again, in the prime of their working years. (I did some playing around with data at MetricMash and these statements seem supportable by the data.)

Now, we know that coupled with higher rates of unemployment, those who do have jobs are working longer hours than ever. Overtime is up among non-exempt workers, and hours are up among exempt workers. So, it would appear that the Gen-Xers are simultaneously working longer hours and volunteering more. Interesting indeed.

UPDATE: August 13.

I’ve had to revise my conclusions on this to take into account the “volunteer life-cycle”. I still think Gen X demonstrates a certain kind of heroism with regards to volunteering in America, but not for the same reason described here. To find out why, click here: “Generation X and Volunteerism – nuancing the “hero” status.“

As a background to this poll, please view the comments that followed the Poverty Tourism Taxonomy 2.0 post, in particular those by mikeonpurpose, Randy LeGrant (from GeoVisions) and the Sept. 4 comment by David Week. (And of course, my responses)

The ongoing debate on poverty tourism got a paroxysm of blogger attention following the recent NYT op-ed by Kennedy Odede, whose personal experience gave him harsh words for what he called Slumdog Tourism. A good assemblage of recent blogs and articles related to the poverty tourism debate is posted at Good Intentions Are Not Enough. As I followed the debate, I realized that the nebulous meaning of “poverty tourism” had many bloggers and commenters talking past each other. A couple of weeks ago I posted my contribution to the debate as a taxonomy of the terms used. The intention of that first post – “Poverty Tourism: A Debate in Need of Typological Nuance” – was that with linguistic clarity, the debate could be more productive and less shrill. The post became my popular and the word tree graphic was reproduced and discussed on a number of blogs and websites, which provided ample feedback leading to this Poverty Tourism Taxonomy 2.0. To avoid a rerun, I’m only providing a few update notes here; for a more complete explanation of the taxonomy, please refer back to the original post.

The Poverty Tourism Family of Travel Terms

Although it sounds straightforward enough, the term poverty tourism has been used to describe a range of travel types involving distinct types of travelers and purposes. The term is most often used disparagingly. An alternative term used more by those highlighting positive aspects is “development tourism.” Both terms are used to discuss three quite different genus-level travel types: education travel, tourism, and volunteerism. Each of these implies a distinct purpose: learning, leisure, and labor, respectively. These are not mutually exclusive, of course; many people travel with mixed motives. The distinction is useful, however, because the primary travel motive informs the way the travel is designed and conducted. For example, a university designing a study abroad trip might include volunteer work, but the primary motive is student learning. This informs the focus the of the travel and defines in large part what a “successful” trip will look like. Likewise, a non-profit organization hosting a group of voluntourists may be mindful of both the learning and leisure motives of the travelers, but they will have a primary focus on the labor that is to be done. Dotted lines in the graphic make explicit some travel types where mixed motives are integral the travel design.

Species-level Update

The only change from the first version is the splitting of voluntourism between commercial and non-profit providers. Commercial voluntourism operators tend to be customer-centric, and primarily profit-driven. Their history and core competencies are focused on responding to the leisure motives of tourism. Non-profit providers of voluntours tend to be more community-centric, and primarily project-driven. Their history and core competencies are focused on responding to the labor motives of volunteerism. In one of my very first posts as a blogger, “The Future of Voluntourism” I provide a more detailed explanation of this difference and its implications for development and vulnerable communities.

Again, to avoid a rerun, I’m not going to describe the meaning of each of these species-level travel types here, but rather refer you back to the original post, “Poverty Tourism: A Debate in Need of Typological Nuance.”

a.k.a.

The list of “also known as” terms is by no means comprehensive. I’m getting introduced to new terms almost daily, including “pet-the-orphan tours”, “cultural zoo trips”, and any number of creative, mostly disparaging terms. The purpose of listing any of these is to show how the taxonomy can help us sort such terms into a linguistic system that facilitates greater clarity. So, although done, one shouldn’t use the term “poverty safari” to talk about a non-profit voluntour. It’s true that a voluntourist may gawk at the locals and snap inappropriate photos, but the type of travel he is doing is not defined by these behaviors, but rather the purpose of the travel as designed by the host. Likewise, you shouldn’t use “missionary safari” to talk about a group of donors from a Christian non-profit that are visiting the projects they help fund. These are just fundamentally different types of travel. Its fun to invent and throw around deprecating terms at people traveling through poor communities, but without at least some care to use terms that actually link back to the intention of the trip, it makes debating the merits or dangers of such travel difficult.

A Case for Competence

A friend once tell me that “passion is perfected in discipline.” The passions that turn people into activists should be harnessed, channeled, and nurtured. Although I’m a big believer in action learning, sometimes the best expression of a passion is to wait, stay out of the action for a while, and invest in your capacity to act with competence. Although it escalated into a sad shrill kerfuffle, I think this was the primary message from the aid bloggers to Jason Sadler and his now defunct 1millionshirts project.

Let’s be clear, you don’t need a Masters degree to effectively serve others, but my own experience has shown that I’m less effective when I’m uninformed. When I don’t know the relevant theories, what has been tried before by others, what the practical steps are to efficiently accomplish what I want to achieve, or even how to frame the right questions about the matter, I’m less effective. Whether at a formal institution or in our hammock – we should all be balancing action with ongoing contemplation and learning.

Effective passion is not about spikes in blood pressure, raised voices, and rock throwing, it’s about caring enough to consider that you might cause harm if you storm in unprepared. It’s about strengthening your voice so that you can be an effective advocate, deepening your knowledge so you can be a non-trivial player, and sharpening your skill so you can be a builder of capacity in others. If you launch into community development, humanitarian aid, environmental activism, peacemaking, or any of the other important activities that people are passionate about without investing in your own preparation, you reinforce the subtle condescending view that these activities don’t constitute real work that require real skills, professionalism, intelligence, or competence. You tacitly underline the idea that the people you serve don’t deserve the best that you or the world has to offer. You reveal your own prejudice that service is more about good intentions than effectiveness. Good intentions aren’t worth much if they bring harm to the people you intend to serve.

An Example of Harm

A lot of the commenters following J’s critique of the Hughes’ bike project wanted to know what the harm was. This is a valid question. The premise for Saundra’s blog title: Good Intentions Are Not Enough, begs the question, “What’s wrong with good intentions? Isn’t doing something better than doing nothing?” Development and aid professionals need to be able to demonstrate with concrete examples why good intentions aren’t enough, and why being an aid elitist isn’t necessarily a terrible thing.

It basically comes down to the law of unintended consequences. The world is a complex place and things don’t always go the way you plan. There will always be unpleasant surprises, but with experience and training comes the ability to foresee and avoid some of them and mitigate others. I’m sure there are better examples than this, but I’ll share an example from international child rights activism that I’ve written about before in The Global Citizen journal.

There are millions of child laborers around the world working in scores of industry and service sectors. The idea that we could we save them by simply boycotting a few of the products manufactured using child labor is a tempting one. In fact, at any given time one can find dozens of ongoing child-labor related boycotts against corporations like Nike, McDonalds, Wal-Mart, Nestle, and Coca-Cola, and specific trade goods like Chinese fireworks, Indian carpets, and Pakistani soccer balls. A quick Google of “child labor boycott” provides ample evidence of how popular the boycott is. Activist teachers turn boycotts into school projects, activist churches turn boycotts into missions, activist politicians turn boycotts into campaign issues and bills.

The intentions are good; the problem is with the outcomes. Few boycotts are ever followed up to see what the actual impact on child welfare was. Most are based on the unexamined assumption that, if they force the closure or relocation of a factory that employs children, child welfare will improve. And so the measures of success are in terms of pain inflicted on the offending companies and changes in their behavior. However, there are some good studies that do follow up on the impact of boycotts on the formerly employed children, and the evidence does not offer much support to these assumptions. The truth is boycotts sometimes result in a decline in child welfare, not an improvement.

When factories close, the underlying preferences and incentives that brought the children into that factory in the first place don’t just disappear. Parents don’t suddenly decide that they can afford to send [their child] to school now that factory is closed. The children don’t suddenly realize the long-term value of pursuing an education. Governments don’t suddenly make policies that obviate the needs of these families. Children who end up laid-off as a result of a boycott often end up moving into more dangerous and lower paid work like stone crushing, fireworks manufacturing, street hustling, and prostitution. Boycotts can lead to a decline in wages paid to child laborers and, paradoxically, even an increase in child labor.

Clearly I’m not advocating child labor, nor am I saying that boycotts of abusive businesses can never improve child welfare. The point is that assumptions about what will happen when you take an action need to be examined carefully. The world is complex and we can’t always predict how economic and social structures will respond to interventions. This shouldn’t paralyze us but if we really care about the people we wish to serve, it is good to value competence. Make sure you are actually affecting the intended change without creating unintended counter-directional change. [We should] intentionally take time to think before [we] act, observe as [we] do, and reflect on what [we've] done.

Whatever your service assignment or vocation, take it seriously. Just because you are a volunteer or do social work or are employed by a faith-based non-profit organization, you are not excused from being professional and well-informed, from being held accountable for both your process and results, from having more than good intentions expected of you by those whom you serve. Subscribe to the pertinent journals, read the relevant literature, attend a conference, find a mentor, go to graduate school, whatever. Get engaged, value competence, be relevant, and do no harm.

A Case for Humility

The bread and butter of a lot of aid bloggers is critiquing aid and development done by professionals. Those of us with Masters degrees in international development and a dozen years of experience still stumble about mucking things up, so isn’t it a bit hypocritical to be so hypercritical of good folks like the Hughes? When I read some of the outright mean comments about these folks, I just want to say “Darn it, we need more people like the Hughes, not less! The world benefits from people who give a damn and are willing to do something, people who can be moved and are motivated to move others. We need the Jasons and Hughes of the world because the alternative is apathy, stagnation, the status quo.” Maybe the world doesn’t need their first efforts, but maybe we shouldn’t shoot them down, but instead nurture them into better second and third efforts.

We tend to manage the tension between embracing people with good intentions and the knowledge of the law of unintended consequences. But we start with being a bit more honest: we aid professionals are first and foremost people with good intentions with a shocking lack of adequate knowledge, experience, and tools to act on those good intentions without causing harm. We do it all the time, so let’s lay off the non-professionals a little bit. In fact, the history of bad development is the history of hubris run amok. I think of the excellent book by James C. Scott, “Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed” and I think about our profession. Our best examples of the law of unintended consequences come from  within our own professional ranks, not the amateurs who generally lack the credibility to be entrusted with giant budgets and resources to really mess things up on a grand scale.

Good critique is necessary, I agree. But we can do it without being mean-spirited, condescending, and elitist. I like Saundra’s approach at Good Intentions are Not Enough. She’s posted numerous helpful and well-toned lessons and guidelines like this one; she’s also pushing for a panel at South by Southwest to discuss what we all can learn from the 1millionshirts venture – an effort that’s also being championed by Tom at A View From The Cave. Sure, blogging success can be found sometimes in being controversial and highly-opinionated, but it can come at a cost of being dishonest and mean, and ultimately it can erode the legitimacy of one’s voice – maybe all of our voices.

I think the best we can do is to encourage good intentions while raising cautionary red flags, demonstrating how real harm can be done by acting too quickly on good passions, and then working to facilitate competence in others, especially those new to the aid and development field. And we can and should do this with grace and humility.

Toward a Common Language and Taxonomy of Poverty Tourism

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UPDATE: An updated graphic with new notes has been posted at Poverty Tourism Taxonomy 2.o

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Poverty Tourism has lately been the subject of renewed blogger chatter and debate. It seems a perennial issue that gets a paroxysm of attention each time a major media outlet runs a story on it. The latest series of posts was set off by a recent NYT op-ed by Kennedy Odede, a Kenyan who had some personal experience and harsh words for what he called Slumdog Tourism. The tone has ranged from reflective to outright shrill.

A decent assemblage of some relevant blogs and articles was posted a couple days ago at Good Intentions Are Not Enough. Especially thoughtful is the Dilemmas post from Lindsay Morgan at Dispatches. Especially interesting is the exchange (criticism, defense, partial apology) between William Easterly at Aid Watch and the Director of a group that operates a Millennium Village Tour in Rwanda.

As I read through these and other posts, it became apparent that many bloggers were talking past each other and using wildly different working definitions of what poverty tourism (or development tourism) is. This makes it hard to have a coherent debate. I’m not the first to notice this; some older posts from Tales From the Hood made a brief attempt at a taxonomic approach noting, “We need some common language for talking about this subject. … We need to be able to make sense of things.” So, I began creating a compendium of names used across the posts – some openly disparaging like “poverty porn”, others more benign like “community tours.” While “Poverty Tourism” or “Development Tourism” is like a family name in biological taxonomy, the dozen or so other terms are sub-varieties like distinct genus or species.

Consider this comment by Chris Blattman in Slum tourism, easy target, harder solution:

I don’t think there is anything good to be said about the worst of the slum tour, but that’s not to say development tourism can’t be respectful or beneficial.

He’s saying that while slum tours are bad, not all development tourism is bad. Implied is that the former is subsumed by the later – a genus within a family. What follows then is my proposed taxonomy of the Poverty Tourism family along with some examples of comments that frame the discussion for each type. I hope this helps us have more linguistic clarity around the fault lines and confluence in our ongoing discussion of poverty tourism.

Type 1: Slum Tours. aka – poverty safaris, ghetto tours, poverty porn, & disaster tours.

When bloggers use these terms, it is generally to derogate poverty tourism. (See Disaster Tourism). Implied by these terms is a dehumanizing voyeuristic approach to travel in poor communities, where the poor are objectified and treated like a zoo exhibit. The tourist remains far removed from their reality as she passes through on a gratuitous visit taking pictures of colorful, exotic, and fascinatingly miserable people, limiting her understanding of them to what the tour guide tells her, and blurring individual lives into a medley of abstract smudges of poverty. It seems the worst of these are those that are organized by for-profit (even if socially-conscious) tourism operators.

Alanna Shaikh at Blood and Milk writes an unusually beautiful and vulnerable reflection related to this:

…poverty makes for great photography. Poverty has texture. … In other words, a good synonym for picturesque is desperate. Aesthetics are seductive. … That can lead you all sorts of terrible places; it can lead you to mistake tragedy for authenticity. It can make you think there is some value to authenticity when people are starving. It can lead you to take gorgeous pictures of the countryside without ever realizing that you are documenting a quiet horror.

Kennedy Odede, who grew up in Kibera, one of the largest slums outside of Nairobe, writes this in Slumdog Tourism:

Slum tourism turns poverty into entertainment, something that can be momentarily experienced and then escaped from. People think they’ve really “seen” something — and then go back to their lives and leave me, my family and my community right where we were before.

Nor do the visitors really interact with us. Aside from the occasional comment, there is no dialogue established, no conversation begun. Slum tourism is a one-way street: They get photos; we lose a piece of our dignity.

But is there anything good about this type of poverty tourism? Chris Blattman writes in an older post on Development Tourism that “Its only virtue, perhaps, is that it is not disguised as a helping hand.” (Thus distinguishing it from other species like voluntourism.) Several bloggers go further, proposing specific changes in attitude and behavior that mitigate the worst dehumanizing effects of slum tours. Nilima Achwal at next billion offers 6 things to look for to make such tours more sensitive to and empowering for the local communities in A New Brand of Poverty Tourism. And, in an otherwise shrill post On poverty tourism: my two African cents at Project Diaspora, the writer admonishes:

“You really want change? Put down the camera, walk up to anyone in that slum, get to know them. Have some tea and crumpets, maybe a chapati slice or two.”

The implication is that there is perhaps a principled, relational approach to slum tourism that preserves human dignity. I particularly like the image of sharing tea, since staying for tea is this blog’s metaphor for a principled, relationship-driven approach to accompaniment and community development. The problem, however, is that while it could be possible for an individual to approach a slum or a community in crisis in this relational, slow way, it is hard to imagine an organized tour managing to pull off anything short of our worst fears.

Type 2: Voluntourism. aka – volunteer vacations, service tourism

Voluntourism is essentially a vacation with a few volunteer activities peppered in. People who sign up for these volunteer vacations sometimes do so out of a desire to touch something more authentic and gritty than the standard cruise ship fare. In other words, the home base in terms of purpose is still tourism. Others, sign up out of a real desire to do something good in the world, but they don’t know where to begin and decide to rely on the professionals to provide not only the logistics, but also the development thinking for them. In this case, the home base is service. Given this duality of purpose, it is not surprising that two very different sort of providers have stepped in to meet the growing demand: for-profit tourist operators and volunteer-sending development NGOs. While the NGOs have mostly just rebranded existing volunteer opportunities as voluntourism, the tourist operators are creating something new, something that looks and smells a lot like a development organization, but is actually customer-centric rather than community-centric, something that aims to generate private profit rather than common good.

But, either way, the poverty tourist is given the opportunity to “do something” immediately about what they are seeing and experiencing during their poverty tour.  In some ways, I think this can be a less honest approach, as often as not the volunteer activities provide superficial and marginal benefit to the community, while assuaging the conscience of the tourist by making them believe they’ve actually done something meaningful. I think I’d rather the tourist observe, struggle with their desire to do something right then and there, discuss, reflect, and then go home to figure out what the experience means for them and how they can be part of something bigger than themselves that is helping make a lasting change.

I tried to give a fair treatment of the subject in my post: The Future of Voluntourism, while raising the necessary red flags. Two other resources are: Voluntourism Gal, a blog dedicated solely to the topic, and VolunTourism.org, which continues to be relevant as one of the first signficant organizations dedicated to voluntourism by name. (I should note that not all voluntourism is associated with poverty-allevation – e.g. there are also many environmentally- and culturally- focused voluntours.)

Type 3: Exposure Trips. aka – vision trips, immersions, & donor tours.

Taking a step toward acceptable practice is the Exposure Trip. The difference between this and a slum tour is two-fold: who goes and with what purpose. Exposure trips are taken by those who have at least an interest connection with development activities taking place in the visited community. Often the visitor is a committed or potential donor, sometimes a Board member of an NGO, sometimes a staff member whose job isn’t field-facing (i.e. someone who works in a pro-poor organization, but whose tasks don’t bring that person into actual contact with the intended beneficiaries of his labour.) The purpose of these trips is for someone with an actual connection or interest in ongoing activities in the community to gain a greater understanding and appreciation of what is actually happening there by seeing it first-hand. Some reasonable unease with exposure trips centers around them being used to justify what are in fact gratuitous visits (i.e. slum tours).

Tales From the Hood writes in Development Tourism: thinking out loud…:

I don’t really want it to be my job. But we need a way to meaningfully and appropriately expose our work to our third audience: ordinary people in our home countries. I’m not saying development tourism is the answer. But it’s one possibility.

Obviously it all has to be structured and handled in a way that does not objectify and demean beneficiaries, and that will necessarily mean that some projects in some places never ever ever get visited as part of development tourism. But again, I have personally seen enough instances where project beneficiaries were very happy – positively stoked, in fact – to receive as visitors “ordinary citizens”…

Saundra Schimmelpfennig at Good Intentions Are Not Enough asks, When is it appropriate for a donor to visit an aid recipient?

Donors do need to have a greater understanding of what does and does not work in aid as well as common problems associated with aid. Properly structured visits can help them become better donors. However, it is important that donor visitations are done is such a way that it puts the needs of aid recipient over the needs of the donor. Care should be taken so that the visit does not objectify aid recipients and ensures that the recipients concerns are heard.

Saundra goes on to suggest 10 very constructive guidelines to help ensure that donor visits focus on education (of the donor), not titillation.

There’s also been some good discussion around Ravi Kanbur’s recent paper “Poverty Professionals and Poverty” that was quoted at some length in Owen Barder’s blog Owen Abroad. Dr. Kanbur suggests that development professions engage in immersions every year or so to get a reality check and reset their focus on the core mission: “serving and helping poor people to work their way, sustainably, out of poverty.” Again, there is some unease about these becoming a way to justify slum tourism, but I think it is reasonable to hope for a net positive affect from connecting those whose work or support is related to the development activities taking place in a community with the community members.

Type 4: Study Abroad. aka – service-learning, cultural exchange & student research

Like exposure trips, study abroad has as its purpose and intentional focus on learning. Obviously, a lot of study abroad trips have nothing to do with poverty tourism. (e.g. a semester in France) But, with the increasing interest in international development, more and more study abroad programs, service-learning programs, and student research is bringing students into poor communities with the intention of learning about them, about poverty, and about anti-poverty projects. The potential for these trips to result in the same pernicious outcomes of the worst of poverty tourism is real.

Chris Blattman takes a rather negative view here:

Yesterday I mourned the extractive and self-serving quality of many student research trips. For me, two-week development adventures fall clearly in the tourism category as well. Is there an argument for these trips actually helping? If so, is the benefit even close to the best use of the thousands of dollars it took to get that person out there?

But these trips also have a potentially rosier upside. Students presumably go with an open mind and an attitude to ask questions and learn. And, if done right, they can even build on a longer-term institutional/community relationship that supports longer-term development activities. One example of this is the Comprehensive (Intercultural Servant) Leadership Program at Gonzaga University lead by Josh Armstrong that has a study abroad component designed collaboratively with community members in Zambezi, Zambia. The community recognizes itself as the host and teacher of the students, while at the same time as beneficiary of student assistance with ongoing activities. By returning each year, a relationship of trust and feedback can be developed between the community and the university.

Beyond the question of what benefits are immediately provided to the host community, study abroad holds out wider potential to shape future global citizens with greater sensitivity to and understanding of global issues like poverty, cultural sustainability, and environmental vulnerability.

Type 5: Short-term Volunteer Trips. aka – church mission trips, missionary safaris

Each year hundreds, if not thousands of short-term volunteers go to all corners of the earth to dig trenches, paint churches, construct latrines, maybe play a game of soccer, and perhaps share their version of the gospel. Each year dozens, if not scores of bloggers aim derision, destain, and disgust at them. It’s an easy group to pick on because they are so green, go with such upside notions of what they doing, and are so clearly the unsuspecting beneficiaries of the whole endeavor.

Maurice at Mostly Maurice offers his critique by way of a definition of a development tourist:

An intern or short-term employee on a contract of up to 1 year, who wants to “experience the developing world” and “help out”, and who will afterwards leave the country, leave Africa and/or even leave development aid work altogether.

Tales From the Hood flat out condems the idea from a Do-No-Harm perspective:

I do not think that it is a good idea for untrained, unpaid foreigners to be sent to work in another country as part of a development or relief program. …if the motivation is an honest and informed desire to offer the very best programming to beneficiaries in the most efficient manner possible, it is all but impossible to justify international volunteers.

Some argue against volunteers from an economic view comparing the cost of exporting unskilled labor from the USA or Germany against the cost of hiring a local. The value of the “free” volunteer doesn’t come close to offsetting the cost of planning, hosting, and managing him, let alone his airfare, room and board. But I think this misses at least half the point of international volunteerism. Of course, the material or project benefit could have been purchased for less than the plane ticket, but the personal and relational benefit of mutual transformation for both the host community and volunteer…well that’s harder to place a dollar value on. And this doesn’t consider any long-term committments to justice and pro-poor policies that begin with exposure and leads to understanding through relationships. Even Tales From the Hood acknowledges:

I got my start as a volunteer. … That initial year as an English teacher in Bangkok changed my life on multiple levels. It exposed me to life outside of North America. It opened a world of possibility. And it led to formal employment with an INGO.

I got my start as an MCC volunteer. Saundra at Good Intentions Are Not Enough got her start as a volunteer. In fact, most people that I know who care deeply about international issues of justice, human rights, environmental and cultural sustainability, fair trade, etc. got that way because of some international volunteer experience that rocked their world. The Jesuits at JVC have a great saying regarding the life-long effects of volunteer service: “Ruined for Life.” This is a big part of the philosophy behind The Krista Foundation for Global Citizenship, for which I serve as a Board member.

The value proposition is changed lives, not just of the visited, but of the visitor, and this is a worthy value proposition.  That said, s-t volunteerism would be less nauseating to the professional development/aid worker if this value proposition was explicitly acknowledged by the visitor (in the place of say a Christ complex) and downright virtuous if made explicit by all parties: the volunteer, the sending organization, and the host community.

Chris Blattman again:

I’m more comfortable with development tourism if it is explicitly that: if students and Westerners are going with an eye to learning rather than saving; if they recognize that they are receiving a service from others more than they are giving of themselves.

Type 6: Community Tours

This is perhaps the most benign and potentially empowering type of poverty tourism because it is the community that manages it. They are involved in the design of the tourism project, sometimes even initiating it. They control who comes, how many come, and what messages they hear. In terms of economic benefit, a typical slum tour may generate some employment in the communities and the tourists may end up donating money to an aid or development organization working with them, but there really isn’t any empowerment or agency happening. With community tourism, on the other hand, the communities control the message – they retell their own story rather than let the tour guides decide how to treat it. And as the hosts, they can also have more say in how the profits are shared and used. For a thorough and very positive (if self-interested) take on community tourism, read Is Community Tourism a Good Thing? at Grassroots Journeys.

Tourism Concern provides a good 10-point checklist of “shoulds” for community tourism in What is Community Tourism? Among the obvious shoulds (be run with involvement and consent of community, give a fair share of profits back, etc.), they say that community tourism should have mechanisms to help communities cope with the impact of western tourists, brief tourists before the trip on appropriate behavior, not make local people perform inappropriate ceremonies, and leave communities alone if they don’t want tourism.

The Millennium Villages tour in Rwanda that was much debated between William Easterly and Michael Grosspietsch seems to be in this category. Dr. Grosspietsch’s response to the initial critique defends the project in part by pointing out the role of the community is designing and controlling the tours.  World Vision report also recently aired an interview with Josh Ruxin, the founder and director of the MV project in Rwanda, who discusses the importance of community involvement.

Some, however, will still find the whole idea of tourism in poor communities degrading, regardless of community involvement. William Easterly is one of these:

I continue to believe that the whole idea of tourists going to see poor people simply because they are poor — or to see the interventions targeted at these poor because they are poor — is degrading. It perpetrates the patronizing view that the poor are some faceless mass of helpless victims which the MV is rescuing, which is part of the flawed philosophy of the MV itself.

A little help here?

So there it is – one of the longest blogs ever posted with over 25 links and a dozen quotes. I already feel a little ridiculous for having written it, but it’s at least ordered my own thinking about the poverty tourism debate. I hope it meets a need for others as well by providing a common linguistic platform for the discussion to move forward on. If you think I’ve gotten something wrong or missed an important distinction, I absolutely welcome your feedback.

A few days ago I got a Facebook post from one of my brothers who was wondering with his wife if they could somehow meld their fall vacation with a week-long mission trip. He asked me if there was “a need for two caring individuals to come help people in any way around [my] area”, which is currently Bogotá, Colombia. My initial thought was “no way, and it’s naive to think that you can make a meaningful difference in a week, especially in a new country where you don’t even speak the local language.” I didn’t respond that brusquely with him, of course, but the idea of peppering a vacation with volunteer service activities just seemed wrong on several levels, and I know first-hand the dangers of unintended consequences that “service” done by well-meaning people can have. In the past, I’ve even used “service tourist” derisively toward fairly committed volunteers who seemed more driven by their desire for adventure and travel than by a serious call to serve humanity or the planet. But this was my own brother, and I know the sincerity and purity of his and his wife’s hearts. I don’t want to be too quick to judge.

Nicholas Kristof’s “disgusting” family vacation

Something just seems unsavory about vacationing too close to human suffering.  Last week (on June 28), the two-time Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof posted this seemingly innocuous update on his Facebook page: “Spent the day in Jerusalem with family, showing sights — including a great tour of Western Wall tunnels. We had a bunch of rocks thrown at us by Palestinian kids in one neighborhood where Palestinian homes are slated for destruction: ya’ani, big rocks, but none hit us.” This set off an avalanche of several hundred comments. Among them were these:

• “Not sure exactly how you live with yourself. There you are walking around on vacation while some families are losing everything they’ve ever had.”
• “what’s despicable is that people can enjoy themselves on vacation while being so closely to massive suffering and despair.”
• “You’re doing the ‘tourist thing’ with your family in Palestinian neighborhoods in Israel?? Really?? Treating it like a day trip with the family to the beach is kinda heartless. I’d throw rocks at you too if I were them.”
• “I find it disgusting.”
• “If it’s for reporting, that’s one thing…But taking your kids there for pleasure? Just makes me sick.”

These are pretty harsh words for a man who makes his living going to the hard places in the world to bring the stories of suffering people to the attention of an otherwise uninformed readership. Why this visceral and acerbic reaction? Perhaps it’s the incongruity of taking leisure where people are suffering. It may be admirable to serve in Haiti and vacation in Hawaii, but it’s somehow despicable to serve in Hawaii and vacation in Haiti. Is this fair?

Just because someone is on a beach in Hawaii doesn’t make the suffering in Haiti any less real. Yet we castigate the person who vacations near suffering and remain indifferent to the person who steals away a safe distance and vacations in some insulated resort while people continue suffering out of sight and out of mind.  Granted, there is still something morally repugnant with having a picnic on a hillside with your children while watching artillery shells rain down on the city below, but maybe there is some ethical room for bringing leisure into proximity with suffering, especially if the leisure time is designed to address the suffering.

An uncomfortable party

When the levees surrounding New Orleans failed catastrophically following hurricane Katrina in 2005, most of the city and many of the surrounding parishes were flooded. It was a true disaster area with widespread and prolonged human suffering. Many people felt it would be heartless to go party in the city just six months later, but that’s exactly what the city asked them to do. The Mardi Gras celebration brings thousands of people and millions of dollars into the city each year. Getting the tourists to come back was vital to city’s economic recovery.

Many developing countries are in a similar yet amplified situation. Places like Tanzania, Guatemala, and Cambodia are home to millions of people living in abject poverty and crisis, and yet each of these countries also has a thriving tourism industry.  When you speak to the people living there, even the very poor,* they are overwhelmingly in support of tourism. They want people to come, spend money, generate employment, and value and share in the place they call home. When I was in Sri Lanka a year after the devastating tsunami, people all along the southern coast were desperate to bring the tourists back, even though many were still living in temporary shelters and mourning lost love ones. The truth is, there are many beautiful places on the earth that offer vacationers spectacular scenery, unparalleled adventure, and warm hospitality, as well as a front-row seat to the indignities and injustice of abject poverty. Should people be squeamish about vacationing in these places, not only would a critical source of income be lost, but the vacationers would miss an opportunity to be exposed to and impacted by the realities of life in these places. Vacationing in Vale, Paris, or Miami only brings more to those who already have much, and keeps those “other places” out of sight and mind.

A New? Vacation Market

I think there may be a progressive link between adventure tourism, eco-tourism, and service tourism. As more and more mainstream vacationers surf the beaches of Costa Rica, hike trails to ancient ruins in Peru, drive mountain bikes through rain forests in Indonesia, ride boats up rivers in India, and tour temples in Cambodia, they are confronted with two unexpected realities: 1) the possibility that their activities are going to ruin the place, and 2) lots and lots of poor people. This inserts a rather uncomfortable feeling into their vacation that maybe they’re doing something ethically questionable. Are they enjoying their leisure at the expense of the place and its people? But instead of planning the following year’s vacation in Hawaii, many decide to do something really different. They go back and look for ways to connect their vacation with the sustainable development of the place and its people.

Of course there are lots of other contributing factors to the growth in popularity of volunteer vacations. In a sense, you could point to the creation of the Peace Corps in 1961 as the start of service tourism in the U.S. (In the UK, you could similarly point to the founding of Volunteer Service Overseas in 1958.) Certainly most of the volunteers who have served since have done so with a humanitarian heart, but many have also (rightly?) seen their terms a government-sponsored adventure vacation. The sharp rise of academic study abroad programs during the 1970s similarly combined two incentives – to learn and to travel. The real boom began in the 1990s, though, as both tourism operators and service organizations began to realize the potential of combining adventure vacations with activities that supported local sustainable development projects.

Now both tourist operators and volunteer service organizations are scrambling to keep up with the demand for both sustainable vacations (eco-tourism) and volunteer vacations (service tourism). And they are having to learn how to work together in ways that benefit both as they both compete and collaborate in these new markets. Today, ecotourism is a multibillion dollar a year business, and service tourism is a rapidly growing market. It’s hard to say just how big the market for volunteer vacations is, however, since it’s not clear when to categorize short-term volunteer service as such. But with Volunteer Vacations being offered on core travel sites like Travelocity (Travel For Good) it is clearly a profitable mainstreamed market. What is also clear is that more and more service assignments are being billed as volunteer vacations. For example, Global Volunteers, which has sent out over 25,000 volunteers in the past 25 years, now refers to their volunteer assignments as “Volunteer Vacations”. Similarly, Global Service Coprs, which has a 15-year history of providing “Service Learning Programs”, has rebranded itself as a provider of “Volunteer Vacations” without actually changing what they do. With all of this rebranding of volunteer service trips and mission trips as “adventure service travel” or “volunteer vacations”, one has to wonder if taking volunteer vacations is what young service volunteers have been doing all along. But, perhaps this rebranding is attracting new recruits; people who wouldn’t otherwise sign up to be volunteer might do so if it’s sold as an adventure vacation with some service activities patched in.

Red Flags Waving

As voluntourism goes mainstream, and the market for volunteer vacations grows, the dangers of unscrupulous operators getting into the game also increases. The evolution of ecotourism is instructive for what surely lies ahead for voluntourism. As the economic incentives increased, some tourist operators simply rebranded their nature tours as eco-tours and essentially used marketing to “greenwash” thoroughly unsustainable practices, such as driving jeeps off-road through the wilderness or paying indigenous people to dress up and role-play to the stereotyped expectations of outsiders. Well-intentioned eco-tourists ended up on vacations as environmentally destructive and economically and culturally exploitative as they come. There are even cases of governments evicting local indigenous people to make room for ecotourism developments from the Philippines to Bangladesh, Brazil, Botswana, and South Africa.

So what lies ahead for voluntourism? The customer-centric focus elevates the experience of the traveler over that of the community where the volunteer activities take place. One website advertises volunteer vacations under the headline “Volunteer On Demand…At Your Convenience.” This may make good business sense – the traveler is paying, the community is not – but there is bound to be some conflict with what the traveler wants and makes good sustainable community development sense. Sales pitches of “getting re-energized”, taking a “tax-deductible vacation”, and gaining an “amazing sense of camaraderie” with fellow volunteer team members beg the question of who is serving who, reduces the community to a tourism product, and sells access to them as part of an experience package.

One has to wonder where this leaves vulnerable communities. When making a profit drives business decisions over traditional service values like “do no harm” or community agency, one has to be a bit pessimistic about that the impact of the volunteer service. That said, I would guess that there will be marked difference between the for-profit tourist operators who begin offering volunteer vacations as part of their portfolio of products and the not-for-profit volunteer service agencies that simply rebrand their learning and service trips as volunteer vacations. The core business experience of a tourism operator is less well suited than that of a volunteer service agency or a development NGO to ensure that the voluntourist’s activities contribute to the development objectives of the community in a culturally sensitive and sustainable manner.

Hope for the Future

Obviously, I’m not the first to feel uneasy about the concept of voluntourism and several organizations are making efforts to help the new market avoid getting corrupted by the economic incentives. A number of ethical codes have been developed for ecotourism operators. One of the earliest is from the Ecotourism Association of Australia, which adopted a Code of Practice in 1994 and has an Eco Certification Program in place. They even have some guidelines for the ecotourists, which I think is great idea. Something similar should be developed for voluntourism. A consortium of legitimate and ethical providers of volunteer vacations would have a market incentive to do this and pay for the operation of a certification program.

Ethical Volunteering is a site that offers guidance to would-be volunteers about choosing a volunteer program. I like this approach; most tourists are just not going to know what questions they should be asking about volunteering or sustainable community development, and they are going to go with what feels good – something that any savvy tourism operator or marketer will know how to manipulate. Ethical Volunteering offers suggestions like exploring how the volunteer program partners with local organizations, asking what eco and ethical policies are in place, and what the time frame is on the project the volunteers will be involved with. These are key questions. If the local community is not involved in decisions about the design and ongoing management of the project, then they can just as easily be a victim of the project as a beneficiary of it. And if the organization offering the volunteer experience has no long-term and regular presence in the community, then questions about disruption and sustainability naturally arise.

Xola Consulting is a group that works with tour operators, government tourism boards, and NGOs to develop adventure and volunteer travel programs that are sustainable and capable of promoting economic and environmental development. I would think that as the market for volunteer vacations grows, the market for consultants like Xola would grow with it. The hope would be that such consulting firms would be as concerned about the well-being of the communities impacted by voluntourism as the economic viability of their client’s volutourism projects. Again, now would be the time for established volunteer service programs to step into this market to help ensure the ethical and sustainable qualities of the volunteer service activities as tourism operators move into the voluntourism market.

There are dozens of organizations providing volunteer vacations, and many (not all, but many) seem to have a well-thought out, balanced, and ethical approach. Among these are VolunTourism.org, Globe Aware, and Global Volunteers.

In the future, the lines will continue to blur between adventure tourism, ecotourism, and voluntourism. The market will continue to grow for these alternative vacation experiences. Inevitably, unscrupulous operators will enter the market as it grows richer, and the service aspect is likely to get watered down as the focus of short-term volunteer opportunities moves toward customer satisfaction and away from quality, ethical, and sustainable community development. But, there is hope too if the legitimate volunteer organizations recognize that this shift in the tourism market is both an existential threat and a fantastic opportunity. If they step in now to provide consulting services, to shape a code of ethics, and to operate a certification program, they can help ensure that voluntourism does right by both the tourist and the communities they volunteer in.

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* I’m not saying this hypothetically; I’ve spoken with people who are among the very poor in each of these countries about their tourism industry and how they feel about it.

(The third image of photographers and children is from Tourism Concern.)