Thinking Twice About Voluntourism

Nicole LaCorte
Jul 21, 2017 · 5 min read

Help the needy. Travel the world. Do both at the same time and you’ve got yourself a perfect scenario, don’t you? Let’s think about that.

The moral line of volunteer travel, colloquially known as “voluntourism,” is an ambiguous one. With social media and an abundance of persuaded millennials, voluntourism has become increasingly more popular. VolunTourism, even, is a recent organization that combines destination trips with acts of service. But with more popularity comes also more critiques and differences of opinions — like from me, for example.

I wasn’t always so averse to voluntourism. In fact, I, at one point in my awfully young life, knew very little about it. The first contact I had with it was through philosopher Ivan Illich and his speech “To Hell with Good Intentions,” which was conveyed all the way back in 1968, long before the boom of volunteer travel. In it, he goes on about how young Westerners, privileged and safe within their home countries, should basically stay out of foreign lands and stop pretending that they give half a damn about the community they’ve been assigned to serve. Brutal, huh? And considering I first read this during my first week enrolled with a service-learning program in Northern Thailand, it comes as no surprise that I wasn’t the most thrilled with Illich’s address; I found him to be incredibly brash, judgmental and shortsighted. Over time, I realized that, just maybe, I was living a false reality.

When I chose to go to Thailand, I was new both to service and living abroad; I had never left the country before, and I hadn’t done much volunteering at all. But I felt that I couldn’t just throw myself into the country for months without at least trying to understand or assist its communities. By doing so, I had hoped that I’d be able to understand the lives and culture of those who actually live there, to bridge the gap of differences and to demolish culture shock; however, a few weeks into my program — which included four days of classes and, for me, two days of teaching — I realized: to hell with good intentions. Because here, they seemed to mean nothing.

Per my program director, this service-learning was almost nothing but resumé fluff, something I hadn’t even considered prior to signing up for the program. My peers and I were split up in our assignments: some taught English at a school across the highway, others worked at a children’s daycare, and I, although not any more qualified than anyone else, was assigned to teach critical thinking and reading comprehension to around thirty Burmese migrants split up into two classes, twice a week. I knew absolutely nothing of the Burmese language, so that was enough of a barrier. And although the students were sweet and respectful, I had absolutely no right to be called “Teacher.” I had no clue what I was doing, no proper training, no idea on how to form a lesson plan and no time to learn how. I had no superiors that tended to me, no one to tell me what to do nor how I should be doing it. I simply showed up to my classes, tried to make sense for my students for ninety minutes, and then went home. As long as I had my hours logged for my director, I would pass my course. Most of my peers, in fact, didn’t even go to their service assignments and ended up quitting them half-way through.

I thought of the volunteers before me, and then the volunteers that would follow. Would they be any more skilled or qualified than I was? Probably not. Would they upload photos with their arms around impoverished, clearly-lesser-than-thou children, go home and tell their friends about the time they spent supervising students and teaching English? Probably, yes.

So maybe I’m a cynic, but I can’t help but feel that voluntourism is the made-up face of colonialism. Spending a few months immersing yourself in a specific culture, learning the language and getting to know the people with whom you share land — fine, I can get down with that. But spending a few months country-hopping from one culture to the next, painting a wall here or pumping a well there? There’s something about that that doesn’t sit well with me. Maybe because it’s easy to have a foreigner spend thousands of their own money to volunteer, to travel to some land they most likely know little about, and do work that someone in the actual community could be getting paid for. The idea is marketable, anyway: get to see a new part of the world while also gaining points for being a great, culturally inclined Samaritan.

Joan Cornellà, © 2017

There have been accounts of Westerners building houses, only for the inhabitants to still beg for food and money once moving in; they may have built a shelter, but they completely ignored the fact that those they were trying to help still have no life or job skills. And, in Cambodia, parents have literally rented out their children to quasi-orphanages so that naïve tourists can play with them, donate some money, and believe that they are engaging in good deeds. TOMS shoes, even, has questionable motives; the brand, popular for their buy-one-give-one scheme, not only creates dissonance between those who receive the shoes and those who do not, but also take away from those who do or could possibly make shoes in those communities. And seventy dollars for a pair of boat shoes, yet they can only donate one extra pair? Let’s be real here.

This isn’t to say that voluntourism should be completely extinct, but rather revised. Despite the flaws of the program I took part in in Thailand, my advisor did speak some words of truth: “You will not change the world overnight.” He was right — I didn’t. Before this, I was living in a false reality, as are many traveling volunteers. But the altruism of these privileged few should not be wasted, only redirected. Instead of focusing on how good this will make them look, volunteers should focus on how much good they can feasibly do; such programs should match the volunteer’s set of skills, and must be realistic, patient, and culturally empathetic. Perhaps then these good intentions will actually mean something.


This essay was originally written in October of 2014, thus the data may be out of date (though not irrelevant).

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Nicole LaCorte

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vague yet poignant, like a dream | fiction and non-

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