Voluntouring a widely popular travel trend and has been for a while now. The broke college student, the confused graduate and the “quit your job to travel” enthusiasts are all major advocates of the voluntouring industry. They travel to an “exotic” culture, become superheroes and help solve their problems by imparting their wisdom and skills and then sail away into the sunset.
Or at least, that’s what we thought voluntouring (or volunteer touring) meant.
Then debates sprung up across the internet. Today, you can look up “voluntouring” and the first ten things you see will tell you it’s a bad idea. Former voluntours themselves have written blogs about how they realized their experiences did more harm than help. Why? Because voluntouring is a perfect recipe for disaster.
So if not volunteered skills, what do developing communities need? The hard truth is, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to the problems of a developing community. But one of the best answers could just be crowdfunding India platforms.
There’s several reasons why the voluntouring trend is simply not working.
One, it takes away the jobs of the locals in the community, giving it to the rich westerners looking to “help out”. Second, the voluntourists who stroll in and out in less than weeks are just not good at their job. For example, Pippa Biddle wrote on the Huffington Post about her school trip to Tanzania when she was a kid. She and 14 other girls spent $3000 to stay there for two weeks and to build a library for the Tanzanian underprivileged children. At the end of their trip, they were congratulated for their effort.
But what really happened was that their construction skills were so poor that the locals themselves had to go to the site at night, take apart the bricks and rebuild the structure more soundly. The girls (and the teachers) had absolutely no idea.
Three, voluntouring doesn’t solve the underlying problem. It simply provides a short term solution (and not a very high quality one) to the effects of the problem. Building houses for the homeless does not solve the actual problem of their poverty. What they need is education and creation of jobs, leading to employment and livelihood, leading to homeless people building their own houses!
So how will crowdfunding India websites help solve the problems voluntouring couldn’t solve?
The solution is to equip the communities to solve their own problems! Get them access to experts on the subject of their problems. Get them access to the kind of infrastructure that would create awareness, employment and progress. Send their children to school. Give them chances to lead; because they know their communities and culture the best, and therefore they are the only ones who can solve their problems. Voluntours cannot do it for them.
All of this becomes possible through funding. Educate your own developed communities about the problems, tell them the stories they haven’t heard and craft your appeal. Crowdfunding India has raised crores of rupees in a handful of years for the sole reason that funding is the need of the hour for nonprofits and communities. Start raising funds today.