Post by Dave SmithMy daughter is considering doing voluntary work next summer out of the
UK. Many of the companies seem to charge an awful lot but don't
necessarily offer a lot to the respective charities. Can anyone
recommend a worthwhile company /organisation who may be able to offer
something for a reasonable price as well as enabling the charity to benefit?
Unless you have some sort of special skill/experience then a student is
just an inexperienced and unskilled person who is only going to be doing a
job for a month or two before leaving. Therefore if you want to do
something that lots of people would be happy to do then
they are going to want more from you than just a month of your time -
i.e., money. If counting exotic turtles on a beach somewhere or
building tiger enclosures in Kenya or whatever was cheap/free then
everyone would do it.
This said, there is lots of voluntary work out there that is free (some
even pays for board and food), but it's not of the
counting-exotic-turtles-on-a-beach variety. I have no experience with this
myself but I've heard a few stories of people helping out with
children-related-things in Europe. Meanwhile I once spent 8 weeks clearing
trails in SW USA for very little cost to myself except air-fare, though
that wasn't really charity work as such (we were clearing trails so
American tourists/hikers/hunters could use them).
Things like this are organized through small organisations in the
countries involved rather than big British organisations shipping students
off to exotic climes, you can probably find out some addresses and
contacts about what exactly is available by asking in a student careers
centre or similar.
I don't know how old your daughter is, organisations like Raleigh etc
charge lots of admin fees in return for which they get a group of young
English students together in a pleasant location to do something vaguely
useful. If you contact small organisations to do voluntary work directly
then you often won't be surrounded by lots of other English students but
rather by various people of different ages, nationalities etc, quite
possibly not in a beautiful tourist location, you might well have to do
hard/boring work and you might even need to speak a different language or
whatever. It depends if she is looking to do something a little more
constructive with her holiday than just going travelling ("I could bum on
a beach in Thailand, or I could pay to meet up with a bunch of
like-minded people and count some turtles whilst I'm at it"),
or whether she really wants to spend a holiday doing work for free.
James