Voluntourism in times of crisis in the Caribbean
by: Carmen Portela, Co-Founder of Local Guest
I know that this topic might be controversial but as a stakeholder in the Caribbean tourism industry, it is my duty to bring this subject forward specially when we receive volunteers in communities in Puerto Rico and our name has been tight in with voluntourism efforts in the island.
Let me start with a bit of backstory. We planned as a team to meet Monday, September 25th, 2017 to assess the situation and see how we could be of service to our loved ones and communities. A week after Hurricane María hit Puerto Rico, we at Local Guest and a couple of friends and colleagues started distributing basics necessities to hard-hit communities without: water, power and food. Our will to help our country was strong.
Our online experience-based tourism platform launched a month before the hurricane and we still had some media traction and wanted to use it for good.
Two weeks after the hurricane we received the first couple of emails from travelers that wanted to come and help. We’re a women powered company processing the hardest crisis that our country had suffered in our lifetime. We acted as fast and as effective as the resources available, and as our mind and body could. We participated daily in multiple conference calls with different relief groups, both local and from the diaspora and something was evident: as a country we urgently needed resources and specially skilled hands. To be honest, nothing prepares you for what we lived. We spent the first two to three weeks after María looking for water, rice & vienna sausages (a Puerto Rican comfort food staple: arroz con salchichas), so our friends from Paellas y Algo Más, Chef Marisol & Universidad del Este could be able to cook for us at the World Central Kitchen HQ in San Juan. In any given day we would distribute more than 3,000 meals.
Family, friends, colleagues and warm hearted citizens from all over the world reached out and wanted to help. This inspired us to open a non profit, Love in Motion. Love in Motion was born twenty days after hurricane María hit Puerto Rico. Our main focus is to provide the tools and education for community based tourism projects to flourish. Three weeks in, we changed the course of our relief efforts and focused primarily in visiting the communities that had been working with us for the last year through our community based tourism programs. The plan was to help them become sustainable again, so they could rebuild themselves stronger and start to receive visitors.
We believe that tourism has the potential to impact positively a host community if its done on a sustainable matter.
What is sustainable tourism? let’s review the meaning: The United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) defines sustainable tourism “as tourism that meets the needs of present tourists and host regions while protecting and enhancing opportunity for the future. Rather than being a type of product, it is an ethos that underpins all tourism activities. As such, it is integral to all aspects of tourism development and management rather than being an add-on component. The objective of sustainable tourism is to retain the economic and social advantages of tourism development while reducing or mitigating any undesirable impacts on the natural, historic, cultural or social environment. This is achieved by balancing the needs of tourists with those of the destination ”.
Sustainable tourism was our driving force before María, thus having various community projects that were in different stages of development. As part of our business model, we started assessing for alternative tourism programs in some of the poorest municipalities of Puerto Rico. We’re a social enterprise in the tourism sector that is looking to generate economic development in our communities through capacity building and our experiential tourism platform that launched a month before the hurricanes.
The silver lightning is that we could now rebuild and rethink our tourism industry. Maybe María could bring us a more responsible traveler, one that cares about the environment, culture and heritage of the destination that they’re visiting. One that appreciates the authenticity of the moment they’re experiencing. An opportunity for tourism to truly generate economic development in our communities and decentralize it from the main attractions. But how do you do this without changing the nature of the community? Our approach was to collaborate with community based organizations and helped them to continue to develop and promote their programs but first, rebuild was needed.
We sat down with community leaders and brainstorm about the future of their community and how they envisioned it. Tackling their biggest concerns first which included roofing houses, sewer damage, lack of medicine, among others. We needed resources from manual labor to materials (both were and still are very scarce in the island).
Then the concept of voluntourism started to appear in the picture. Industry experts educated us about the meaning and proper ways to establish a program. And then we found ourselves not agreeing with how the industry viewed voluntourism. It felt a bit unnerving to wholesale our communities in order to create a packaged experience.
Since we have always been a bit of disruptors we figured that once again, we were going on a different route. Knowing first hand that most communities weren’t ready to receive lots of volunteers we started by bringing skilled volunteers, specially for roofing, but this volunteers only came for a specific timeframe maybe days or hours and our projects needed to be completed. Local manual labor needed to be compensated for their work, materials needed to be bought, ect,ect. The relief operation needed to be sustainable. We sat down and started crushing numbers and figure a formula that could help us continue to bring the resources necessary to impacting positively the community. We read a lot of best practices from all over the world in order to not reinvent the wheel but to apply what made sense for Puerto Rico. We started charging or asking for donations from skilled volunteers and travelers for the resources (materials and money) needed to complete the projects. All this was done with an engage and active community and their community leaders. We hired locals (from the community if available) for the daily labor and the community cooks prepared the meals. Some of the communities even started offering their community tours again in order to generate a bit of cash. Some of our skilled volunteers included: sustainable tourism experts, architects, roofers, army corps, ect,ect. All was done in a respectful way to the community while helping them get back on their feet faster.
We value immensely the love received by the travelers that engage daily with our online community and that have reached us to lend a helping hand.
Most of our community rebuild projects were completed on May 1st, 2018 and the communities are ready to receive visitors again like they did before María. We started collaborating in new projects and feel full of hope for the future of the new sustainable ecosystem that we see and envision for our island and the Caribbean. A couple of bridges with like-minded networks have been built because together we’re stronger. A different kind of travel is possible if we start taking ownership of our daily actions. Do we learn from the past and build sustainably or we continue our dependency in mass tourism?
If you want to learn a bit more about us visit: www.facebook.com/localguest.com (we’re in the process of revamping our website so is best to reach us via email: hello@localguest.com).
