CHAPTER 6

AVOIDING “VOLUNTOURISM” AND “POVERTY TOURISM”

DURING COLLEGE I joined a small youth group in Jerusalem that focused on giving back to our society; we were all in our late teens and early 20s. There were elderly people in our community who were lonely and did not have caregivers to assist them; they didn’t have any connections to the younger generation.

We decided that every week we would take a few hours to visit these people, spend time with them, clean their houses, and listen to their stories. I can still vividly picture their faces and the warmth I felt from them. I remember Georgette, a woman approaching her 80 th birthday, with a charming and kind face. She lived in the Christian Quarter of the Old City in Jerusalem. I was a young boy from a Muslim family, visiting a Christian woman every week. But neither of us cared much about those labels. She didn’t have any children, and I felt that she always treated me like a son. She didn’t need much help with physical labor, but she enjoyed our visiting and spending time with her. I also loved listening to her stories about Jerusalem back in the 1940s and 1950s.

Later, we decided to start volunteering at a local orphanage and other institutions. This was my first encounter with volunteer work, and I have since realized that I benefited from these experiences even more than those I was helping. I learned from the wisdom of others. I witnessed the social problems and injustices in my community, and I was inspired by the resilience and strength of those who had very little. Volunteering taught me that my life should not be only about my own needs and desires. Therefore, I am a strong believer in volunteering and in organizations that provide people the opportunity to volunteer.

Volunteering versus Voluntourism

According to a 2014 NPR article, “More than 1.6 million volunteer tourists are spending about $2 billion each year.”¹ This is a fast-growing trend, and while it is great that people are interested in doing good deeds while traveling, there are also significant concerns to address.

Mass tourism and volunteering do not partner well together. Instead, volunteering should be heavily regulated and needs to be supported by the entire community—not just a few tour operators who are benefiting from the volunteer industry.

In some countries, such as Cambodia, orphanage tourism has become a commercialized industry focused on creating maximum profit. According to a 2012 Telegraph report, UNICEF reported a significant increase in orphanages in Cambodia, from 153 to 269 between 2007 and 2012; however, only 21 of these were state run.² According to the Guardian, in 2017 the number grew to 406, housing over 16,500 children, yet 80 percent of them were not orphans.³

According to the NPR article, some of these orphanages were tourism scams, in which children at times were rented from their parents to show them off to tourists. In other cases, the orphanage directors kept the institution at a substandard level and the children in poor conditions in order to attract more donations. “Voluntourism” (short-term volunteering abroad, whose purpose is more tourism than community development) has become the cause of these children’s suffering.

In light of these realities, it’s important to ask questions before volunteering with an organization, especially if you’re planning to work with children. First, do your research about the organization you want to volunteer with, and don’t be enticed by slick marketing. Be wary of any organization that accepts tourists without requesting proof of your qualifications and expertise.

Second, seek references, and if possible reach out to others who have worked with that organization or volunteered there. This is important because it will also prepare you for the organization’s work and for challenges you might face.

Third, make sure you are not stealing a local’s job. Volunteering should be about helping the local community, not contributing to unemployment. Volunteers should be assisting local staff—not replacing them with free foreign labor.

Finally, be conscious of where your money is going and how it’s being used by the organization. Kim Passy Yoseph, a colleague of mine at MEJDI Tours, volunteered in Ethiopia. She did her research and ended up volunteering at a hospital on the outskirts of Addis Ababa. The hospital had a disabled boys’ orphanage, but not every volunteer had access to it. The hospital staff believed that short-term volunteers would create abandonment issues for the kids when the volunteers left. So, only long-term volunteers who had shown commitment were eventually introduced to the kids.

The local staff at the hospital also made each volunteer prove that he or she was there for work and not just for a fun adventure. In the first week, volunteers were tasked with cleaning the hospital and taking a language course; this was to assure the staff that volunteers genuinely cared about working at the hospital before they were assigned to a section.

Kim learned sign language and used the Amharic she had learned to translate between doctors and deaf patients. “I had to ditch the attitude that we are going there to change the world. My main job was really to make the lives of the Ethiopian employees a little easier. They worked over 10 hours a day,” she said. Volunteers in that hospital were there to help local staff and not replace them. Other professional volunteers had also participated: a physiotherapist from England, for instance, didn’t work directly with patients. Instead, she focused on increasing the capacity of the Ethiopian staff to conduct this particular kind of work.

We all have expertise and knowledge we can share with the world, and we can use these skills when we volunteer. There are great organizations out there with impressive volunteering projects. MovingWorlds, for instance, was founded by professionals who wanted to use their skills to assist organizations and social enterprises in areas where they might have a lack of either human resources or financial capacity. MovingWorlds connects professionals to these organizations and provides training to travelers to ensure that the outcome of their experiences matches their expectations.

People and Places is also a great organization.⁴ They connect travelers to projects based on specific skills needed in real time. Like MovingWorlds, they expect volunteers to have experience in the field where they want to work, and they have a list of qualifications and expectations for each position. They are committed to not threatening local jobs, and the travelers pay the local organizations directly in country instead of paying People and Places, which demonstrates outstanding transparency. These local organizations are continuously vetted by People and Places to make sure that the funds are going to their intended purpose and that volunteers are fulfilling their mission without harming the local communities.

Volunteering Is Educational

When Kim finished her army service in Israel as a commander and a training officer, she subsequently decided to take some time off and volunteer. While many Israelis take a year after the army to travel and explore the world, Kim felt that she should focus on volunteering.

Kim was not new to volunteering. Living in Kochav Yair, on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, she realized that she had never met an Ethiopian Jew and decided to volunteer with an Ethiopian community that lived just a half hour away from her. Kim volunteered to help the community’s youth scouts.

During this volunteer experience, her interest in Africa began taking shape. She decided to travel to the continent during her gap year before army service. She first traveled to Zimbabwe and volunteered for two months, and then headed to Ethiopia for another two months.

In Zimbabwe, she taught English to a group of teenagers. The classes included leadership training, civil and human rights issues, and world affairs. At the same time, she learned from the teens and their realities in Zimbabwe. She learned about extreme poverty and lack of opportunities that they faced.

During her time in Zimbabwe, Kim lived with a white Zimbabwean family that wasn’t pleased with her decision to volunteer with the black community, and they continued to question her resolve to support their “enemy.” The division between whites and blacks in Zimbabwe has a long and brutal history—rooted in the bloody legacy of colonization.

Former Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe headed a land reform policy that redistributed thousands of farms owned by the white minority of Zimbabweans to black citizens. Mugabe viewed the land ownership by whites as a consequence of colonization and claimed that redistributing land would offer greater equality.

The family that Kim stayed with had lost their land under Mugabe’s reforms. They questioned Kim’s decision to come all the way from Israel to volunteer with a population they saw as their enemy. Kim was quickly compelled to learn about the country’s history and engage in discussions with various groups to understand the multiplicity of narratives in the country.

However, her experience in Zimbabwe had an impact that hit closer to home; it reminded her of the situation between Israelis and Palestinians. She had also met people from various parts of the world who had come to Israel and Palestine to volunteer with Palestinians. She told me that she felt frustrated at one point when she met a group of travelers who were intending to join a peace march in Bethlehem but had no plans to visit Israeli communities. She didn’t understand why someone would volunteer only on the Palestinian side. As an Israeli soldier, she viewed Palestinians as her enemy, and these volunteers were there to support her enemy.

“The white Zimbabwean family was mirroring my earlier thoughts, I realized,” Kim explained to me. “Maybe the person that I think is an enemy, others don’t see them this way.”

She returned home with the belief that everyone is entitled to have a good life. “I realized that my life in Israel was much better than how many Palestinians live, especially in Gaza,” she said. “Maybe, when I go back home and think about what’s happening back in Israel, I could volunteer and help, because I knew Palestinians were having a difficult life. I was definitely less judgmental and more open-minded after this experience.” Upon returning, Kim engaged with the Palestinian community, and that was what led to her work with MEJDI Tours. Her transformation had an effect on her family as well. Recently, I was invited to spend the evening with Kim and her extended family for Shabbat dinner, and in 2018, Kim arranged for me to travel to Russia for the World Cup with her brother and father (a former Israeli football player).

Kim’s volunteering experience not only helped her to understand the conflict in Zimbabwe but also assisted her in reflecting on the conflict in her home country. She learned to be less judgmental, and today she works overseeing travel programs that bring Palestinians and Israelis together. She works side by side with Palestinian tour guides and Palestinian speakers, and has become a leader in educational travel in the Middle East.

Volunteering for Kim didn’t end when she left Ethiopia. It has built bridges for her back home in Israel. She was able to connect with her own community much better because of her volunteering experience overseas. For her, volunteering wasn’t a onetime thing but rather a lifestyle that would continue to shape her character and her relationships.

Poverty Tourism versus Social Justice Tours

I have been to Brazil a half dozen times, and each time I visit, I learn new narratives and new perspectives. I have learned about colonialism and how it has continued to impact Brazil today, I have learned about dictatorship in the country’s history, and I have learned about the environmental issues of legal and illegal logging in the Amazon rainforest. However, nothing has affected me as much as learning about the poverty and violence in the country’s favelas.

A few years ago, I visited Sâo Paulo, the largest city in Brazil (a city that often appears on “Most Dangerous Cities in the World” lists), to try to learn more about the challenges that the city faces. I wanted to visit a favela but was cautious about taking a “favela tour” because quite a few of them were engaged in “poverty tourism.”

I feel strongly that while it is important to engage with modern issues, we should also refuse to participate in poverty tourism and disaster tourism. What’s the difference between responsible tourism and disaster or poverty tourism? In my experience, poverty tourism tends to consist of tourists visiting a poor area for a short time; traipsing through neighborhoods; and occasionally stopping to take photos of residents or pose for a few Instagram shots with poor African, Asian, or Latin American children. It doesn’t employ locals; most of the income goes to external tour operators; and residents have no say in the route, stories, or outcome of the tours. I find this kind of tourism disrespectful and even disgusting, and I’m not willing to engage in it.

To avoid this kind of tourism, in Brazil I asked my friend Marina, who was working for an environmental NGO, if she knew someone from a favela in Sâo Paulo. She quickly introduced me to her coworker Marcia Lica from Real Parque. Marcia was born in the interior of Brazil, in a city located in the Amazon region. She is the eldest of five girls. Her mother had her at 17 and was unable to raise her, forcing her to live with her grandmother for some time.

Searching for a better life, Marcia’s mother and her husband decided to move to Sâo Paulo. Marcia joined them in the favela Real Parque when she was 13. When she arrived, she quickly noticed that the conditions in her new home were worse than she could have imagined.

“I imagined that in Sâo Paulo everything was beautiful: big houses, cars—just like we saw on TV,” she told me. “When I arrived in Real Parque, I was scared; it was a pile of crammed wooden shacks, sewage, garbage, rats, cockroaches, and I still remember the terrible smell. There was no bathroom in our shack.”

As she recalled, “When it was raining hard, the neighbor’s sewage passed into our room. It was very stinky—an inhuman place. As a child, I had no idea that we were living in a situation that was not only representative of poverty, but also of misery and a violation of our rights,” she said.

“The favela was very violent. Every day, there was a [dead] body on the street. Seeing the dead became almost normal for the residents. It just happened. Today I understand that what we saw was a war.”

On our way to the favela, we passed through the Morumbi neighborhood—one of the nicest neighborhoods in Brazil, known for having the most expensive real estate in Sâo Paulo. The reality of poverty in the favela is even more stark, because it’s located near this neighborhood’s luxurious mansions and businesses.

It took Marcia only two years to organize and become a leader in her community. Soon after she celebrated her 15th birthday, she was already organizing social justice initiatives. She became involved in educational and cultural projects for young women, such as helping them to read. When I asked her where a 15-year-old found the courage to become a social activist in such hard living conditions, she replied, “I believe our mothers taught us to be strong and to not conform to this reality of inequality, and to intervene to make things better through theater, dance, music, and protesting against the government.” As she put it, she realized there was no other choice but to change the realities on the ground, and she refused to accept that this was what her community deserved.

As I walked through the favela, it didn’t actually look that bad. The houses seemed decent. I didn’t smell any sewage, and the school building had a nice classroom and a decent football court on the roof. This was when I was invited to play a soccer match with the kids in the neighborhood, and it was there where I learned that some stereotypes are accurate: Brazilians are extremely talented at football!

Marcia told me that when she was 21 and in her third year of college, she was among the leaders in her community who challenged the city, a real estate company, and the police in order to protect her community. Some residents were displaced, and land was being set for confiscation to build a new road and develop real estate. The favela residents eventually won and even managed to organize an urbanization plan that led to the rebuilding of the favela. Now, they have decent housing, plumbing, electricity, and a functional sewage system.

But what excites Marcia the most about these changes is her hope that the next generation will now have the opportunity to step out of poverty and fulfill their dreams. “We started to have a generation—our children, nephews, and nieces—who already dream much bigger than we did because this generation isn’t living the violence we experienced and the conditions we endured.”

Despite the past and current challenges, Marcia loves the favela because it has become her home. She talks about her favela with passion. It’s sometimes easy to forget that she is talking about an impoverished neighborhood, because she sees what most of us from the outside never get the opportunity to see.

“I like the people, the coexistence on the streets, the children playing on the blocks of the buildings. My neighbors know me and greet me every morning. If I’m sick or I need help, I know I’m not alone. Here everyone knows their neighbors and cares about each other. We have many challenges, but we are a community, which is something rare in a giant city like Sâo Paulo,” she told me.

“When I return from work and enter the favela, I feel safe. I know that I won’t be robbed or raped. Sadly, my only fear in the favela is from the police.”

This is unfortunately not the reality that most people think about when they hear the word favela. But people in the favela are not what you typically see in the media. As I walked through the neighborhood, I wasn’t scared. The residents were welcoming, and many were happy that I was there.

I felt I was visiting a community that valued friendships and relationships. The stories of the favela Real Parque were stories of inspiration and overcoming—stories that should be told all over the world. Marcia’s activities, which challenge the negative stereotypes about favelas, are inspiring.

“I feel better being in any favela in Brazil than any other place. I feel at home. If you come to visit us, come with respect, and learn about our lives,” she said.

I asked Marcia what she thought about the favela tours that often run in Sâo Paulo. As she explained, these tourists visit the favelas to get a good shot of poor children in the streets. These people do not respect the community members’ privacy and disrespect the locals. Marcia said that no one in the world would allow someone into their home with a camera aimed and ready to take photos of their children, bathroom, and bedroom.

“We are not just characters for tourist photography; we have stories. Can you imagine if I walked into a wealthy neighborhood, took a picture of their daily lives, their kids, their homes, and then published the photos without permission?” Marcia said.

Travelers are still welcome, but they must engage with the community and ask permission to visit the favela. Travel agencies bringing tourists need to coordinate with community leaders and communicate with travelers regarding what’s acceptable and what’s not acceptable during the visit.

There also need to be clear benefits to the community from these tours. Families who host travelers should be reimbursed fairly. The profits should not go only to the travel agency. And gift handouts to poor children are not enough (and in fact often do a lot of harm to the community, which comes to associate foreigners with handouts).

Each community and person is complex and multidimensional—and everyone wants to be recognized for more than just the negative aspects of their lives. Unfortunately, too many tours in the favelas focus only on the negatives. Poverty, crime, and danger are the central topics for tour companies that package the favela tours as an “adventure” or “exploration” of a poor neighborhood, instead of an important educational opportunity.

When we visit a new place, we should look into what the local community wants us to learn about their neighborhoods, lives, and traditions. Residents in the Brazilian favelas do not want us to learn only about their suffering; they also want their stories of struggle and innovation to be heard. When we actually listen to the local people, that’s when we begin to see them as human beings and break the stereotypes that simplify their complex lives into a caricature of poverty.

During my day with Marcia in the favela, I met artists, students, photographers, shopkeepers, social activists, and various other people. I did not listen to just one narrative; I listened to a variety of narratives and local stories. I was overwhelmed by the generosity of the locals there.

We were invited for a drink by almost every shopkeeper we passed. I had lunch with Marcia’s family and met her sisters, nephews, nieces, and mother. At no point during my visit did I feel uncomfortable or unsafe. Marcia told me that this was because I was not there as an intruder. Instead, I was there as a guest.

Owing to my experience in the favela, I could never again think of a favela (or any other poor neighborhood) in a singular narrative that generalized the complex lives of the people there. Indeed, a place that raised a strong and inspirational leader like Marcia must have many positive lessons to offer the world.

My experience in the favela was different from poverty tourism, which doesn’t have any respect for the travelers or the local communities. I remember visiting New Orleans a year after Hurricane Katrina and coming across an advertisement that offered tours “of Hurricane Katrina’s most hit areas from the comfort of your air-conditioned bus.” Basically, go and see the suffering of people who have lost their homes. Poverty tourism doesn’t offer any true engagement with people and doesn’t benefit anyone but the tour operator’s profit.

So, if you find yourself on a social justice tour, ask the local operator a few questions, such as these:

• Will we meet with locals on this tour? Who are they?

• How do you cooperate with the local communities?

• How did you decide on how to build the route for this tour?

• How does the community benefit from the tour? Do you pay local guides and speakers?

• What is acceptable and what is not acceptable for us to do on the tour?

Consider Your Motives

You know that voluntourism has become a problem when the Onion runs stories like “6-Day Visit to Rural African Village Completely Changes Woman’s Facebook Profile Picture,”⁵ and Instagram has a parody account (@BarbieSavior) that uses dolls to re-create women’s photos with African children, with the description “Jesus. Adventures. Africa. Two worlds. One love. Babies. Beauty. Not qualified. Called. 20 years young. It’s not about me . . . but it kind of is.”

Volunteering while traveling can be complicated. Many people ask me about traveling abroad to volunteer—where they should go and what kind of volunteering they should do. My first response is to ask whether they have volunteered in their own communities. Volunteering is not for everyone, but those interested in volunteering must be motivated by the desire to help others. It’s hard to make a case for helping people living thousands of miles away if a person has not volunteered in his or her own community. Volunteering should be a way of life, not an “experience” on a tour.

If people see volunteering abroad as romanticized and a “fun activity,” but view volunteering at home as boring or unnecessary, that is usually a red flag that their desire to volunteer is about them—not about the people they want to visit.

In 2017, I was invited to speak at a middle school in Sâo Paulo about my educational work with Syrian refugees. After my presentation about the Syrian refugee crisis, in which I highlighted stories of the resilience and aspirations of Syrian kids, I found myself surrounded by dozens of 13- and 14-year-old children who were moved by the stories of these refugees.

Mari, a 13-year-old, walked up to me and said that she wanted to help Syrian refugees, but because she lived in Brazil, she wasn’t able to. “But I want to help people in my own community. I will talk to my mother today about us volunteering in Sâo Paulo,” she said. I felt inspired by this young girl; despite her age, she had understood that my message wasn’t about everyone traveling to Syria to help out—which is neither feasible nor sustainable. Instead, it was about helping in our own communities. Mari was a perfect example of where volunteering needs to start.

If you are interested in volunteering abroad, consider volunteering in your own city or country first; this way, you can learn about the essence of volunteering, deal with everyday challenges, and figure out what your skill sets are. Those who travel abroad to volunteer for the first time may end up facing unexpected issues in a new country.

Volunteering abroad is also often counterproductive. In Turkey, I met with Shannon, an Australian who had been living in Istanbul for a number of years. She sat on the board of a refugee community center in the city. As she explained, she got countless emails and calls from tourists hoping to volunteer at the center. Often, foreigners would call and ask to volunteer for a few hours or for one or two days. But as Shannon described, she rejected most of these inquiries, because the volunteer would create more work for the center. Providing an orientation to these volunteers was time-consuming for the staff and was not worth it, compared with the short amount of time the volunteers would be staying.

It is good for tourists to want to help, but short-term volunteering can be problematic and unsustainable. It provides a good feeling to the tourist, but it often fails to help the organization needing assistance. In some cases, it actually hurts the organization by taking up its time, focus, and resources.

Some experienced organizations, like Habitat for Humanity, have successfully designed programs that work for short-term travel; but the majority of organizations do not have such programs or expertise in place. I have heard numerous stories of people volunteering to build or reconstruct homes and schools, and the moment the volunteers went to bed, the locals stayed up all night fixing what the volunteers had done—because the volunteers had no real experience in construction and had no guidance or experts to help them. Some opportunistic tour operators taking advantage of well-intentioned travelers run “construction tours” to build houses or schools without proper preparation or collaboration with local communities, causing more harm than good.

Our motivation for volunteering must be something we examine within ourselves. We must ask ourselves why we are interested in volunteering while traveling. If travelers’ motivation is to feel good about themselves, have more meaning in their life, or have a good time as part of a short-term volunteering experience, then they probably shouldn’t do it. I encourage travelers to also ask themselves: Have I volunteered at home, or do I just want to volunteer somewhere “exotic”? What are my skills? If you have never worked with children or have no teaching experience, then teaching might not be the best option for you.

Volunteering should be less about the experiences of the traveler and more about the impact it will have on the community or organization receiving the volunteers. It’s not an opportunity for an Instagram moment with refugees or poor children. (There’s something wrong when the entire time that travelers are volunteering, they are just taking photos of themselves hugging children and uploading them on their social media.) If your main focus is showing people what you are volunteering, then your activities are more harmful than helpful.

Volunteering Should Empower Others

Volunteering shouldn’t be about self-glorification or amplifying your voice, but rather about helping underprivileged communities amplify their voice. And there are a few constructive ways you can do that.

In 2014, I visited Zaatari camp in Jordan with the Red Crescent to help take photos of the organization’s activities. As I walked around the bleak desert encampment—rows of white tents on a flat, hard, cracked desert plain—I took photos, talking with the refugees and gathering stories. It was around noon, and no less than 100 degrees outside, when I saw a child who couldn’t have been older than four or five years old. He was frowning and walking toward me from a tent in the distance. As he got closer, a wide smile formed on his face.

I aimed my camera at him and took a photo, as his smile spread from ear to ear. When I approached to speak to him, I noticed what had prompted his wide grin: a piece of trash on the ground. That piece of trash was the only toy he had found to play with in the camp, and it made him so excited that he could hardly contain himself.

His name, he told me, was Ahmad. I asked him how long he had been in the camp. He bluntly replied, “Always.” The camp had been established two years earlier, so that couldn’t be possible, I thought. But then I realized that two years represented half of this child’s life. He didn’t remember what life was like the year before.

I ended up telling his story through photographs during presentations I did in the United States, Europe, and South America. He became a symbol for me of what being a refugee means. I wanted the world to understand the suffering of these refugee children.

However, one day, when I was speaking about Ahmad during one of my presentations, it dawned on me that I wasn’t actually telling his story. I was telling my own story of how I had encountered him and what I felt he represented.

I decided it was important to create spaces where refugees could tell their own stories, through their own eyes, words, and camera lenses. I contacted National Geographic, and they agreed to help set up a photography camp in Jordan. The camp would teach the kids, who were about 13 to 14 years old, how to take their own photos and tell their own stories.

We set up the project as a collaboration between several famous photographers and some local Jordanians and Syrians. Each day, we worked with the kids, teaching them photography and editing skills. Then we sent them out with cameras so they could take pictures of their lives in the camp.

They were fast learners! When they showed us the photos they had taken around the camp, I was shocked by both the quality and the content. I had assumed that their photos would show the suffering, poverty, and pain they were experiencing in the camp. I was wrong. What the children deemed important was entirely different from what I had tried to say for them as an outsider. A lot of their photos were of family, friends, and each other. One of them took a picture of a pigeon on his hand, preparing to fly. These were messages of hope, emphasizing the importance of love, family, and relationships.

In the long run, the project helped empower the children to tell their stories. The children who participated in that project, now in college, still engage in different projects, speaking about their lives, their stories, and their photography (which has been exhibited in such venues as the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, and published in National Geographic magazine). At times, they are paid to speak and spread awareness about Syrian refugees to groups visiting Jordan; this helps sustain their situation while they are paying for college or assisting their families.

Since I work in cultural education, after the photography workshop in Jordan, I also spoke with teachers in Brazil about these children’s stories. The teachers expressed interest in arranging a recurring Skype session between Brazilian students and Syrian students in Jordan to practice English, learn about one another, and share their stories. These encounters were transformational because the kids realized that the world was bigger than what they could see. The Syrian teenagers were moved by the compassion and care that their Brazilian counterparts had for them.

This example should emphasize to travelers how important it is to not just come into a community, take pictures, and then share those people’s stories. We should also be looking for sustainable ways to provide platforms for communities to tell their own stories. When we connect with a community, we should consider our own networks and abilities, and ask if there is a way we can use these resources to empower communities and help others amplify their voices.

Of course, we should speak about the people and stories we’ve encountered in our travels, but we should always be conscious of the fact that appointing ourselves as a spokesperson for a community is not always the most positive action to take—even if it’s well-intentioned. We should always make it clear when we speak about another community that it is from our own perspective as a traveler; spending a week in a place does not make you an authority on that community.

Volunteering and Visiting Underprivileged Communities in a Constructive Way

I strongly believe in the value of volunteering. It has shaped my understanding of my own city in Jerusalem. There are very few things as fulfilling or educational as volunteering.

But volunteering and visiting underprivileged communities must be less about our own needs and fulfillment, and more about those we aim to help. As a result, here are a few tips I suggest that travelers consider to keep volunteering sustainable, responsible, and constructive:

• Don’t volunteer abroad if you are not willing to do it at home in your own city or country.

• Evaluate your motives for wanting to volunteer or visit an underprivileged community.

• Choose long-term volunteer programs; approach short-term programs with caution.

• Be wary of any organization that accepts tourists without requesting proof of appropriate qualifications and expertise.

• Do your research about the organization you want to volunteer with. Know how the organization is using its money. (Do a web search or request its annual report, and see how much is going to actual programs and how much is being used for administration and overhead. In almost every country, organizations are required to release this information to maintain nonprofit status.)

• Don’t take unpaid volunteer jobs that a local could be doing in a paid position.

• Don’t visit or take tours through poor areas, spend a few hours taking photos, then leave. Evaluate why you want to go, and if you go, connect with local organizations you can engage with and support.

• Don’t speak for others; empower others to speak for themselves.

• Ask how you can use your networks, talents, and resources to create (or support) platforms that empower locals.

It is extremely important that when volunteering, we follow the principle “First, do no harm.” Gift handouts, visiting poor neighborhoods to take pictures with children, and constant turnovers of unqualified foreign labor can harm communities and deepen cultural misunderstanding.

As a result, if you volunteer abroad or visit a poor neighborhood, do so with care and reflection. There is nothing responsible about using privilege to patronize others, exacerbate inequalities, and rob people of their human dignity. Those we take photos of are people, not scenery. Whether volunteering or taking a tour, we must recognize our privilege and not use it to demean others, exacerbate inequalities, or rob people of their human dignity. Our own desires for attention, meaning, or self-satisfaction are not as important as the health and well-being of the communities we visit.