To think this is tone deaf and a dreadful use of charitable money?

[fuckthisprivilage]

I live in a very affluent area where most kids are at independent schools.

We have a local WhatsApp group and a teenager has posted offering to do odd jobs to earn money (several thousand pounds) towards paying for a school trip - a month long holiday to an amazing destination under the guise of doing "community work". Now personally I hate this kind of western saviour type shit but whatever, and there is nothing wrong with the kid offering to take on odd jobs to help fund a tiny fraction of it.

What's really boiled my piss is that some trustees of a local charity have now responded and encouraged him to apply for funding from them. WTF?!!! In what world should a charity be sponsoring a privileged child from a hugely privileged background to take a month long holiday that will cost five figures, in the middle of a COL crisis that is seeing families using food banks and kids that will literally NEVER experience even a week by the seaside during their entire childhoods? Surely it should be the responsibility of the parents to pay for this hugely indulgent experience, not a bloody charity?

"shitsville" lovely....

I also did one of these back in 2008 when I was 17.

When I was 17 I really wasn't thinking about volunteering abroad being a terrible thing. We worked at an animal sanctuary mostly scrubbing the floors and I'm pretty sure the company organising it paid for us to be there.

The whole ethos was that you had to get the money yourselves. No 17 year old in my very not private school had that cash so you were encouraged to fundraise. Now, I do see it as paying for someone's holiday so if my kid went I would just pay for them but it was very much what you had to do so don't blame the kid or contact the charity to not fund him.

I've been to about 50 countries. The only place I would describe as that word is LA. Won't someone think about the Californians!!?!?!?

And surely one of the points of these trips is to teach you that almost all British children are priviledged. Free healthcare, running water, primary education, vaccines on tap...

I’m going to assume from the responses then that other people don’t want to go. So what is it, a free luxury holiday or…. Hard work building things in the heat that actually now you think about you don’t want to do.

You are deliberately misunderstanding people's concerns about these trips

No one on this thread has said they want to go, and it isn't particularly hard work- I have just been looking at one of the companies that offers these trips and they do about 4 hours of work per day.

It's a jolly so that British kids can go and see the poor folk and make them feel like they've done their bit.

Raising £3000 and sending it to a charity that supports local people to improve their communities would be significantly better but that means that the British kids don't get the holiday.

I've heard that with some trips, they build something, then pull it down and then the next load of volunteers build it, then it's built again.

No idea if this is true or not but I can easily believe it.

I HAVE been to many of these places. And they are beautiful and rewarding and special. But I pay to go and spend as much of the budget as I can locally.

And it may be hard work. But it's hard work that could be done better, cheaper and with more benefit to the wider community by local workers. Who actually need the work!

I went on a trip like this when I was 18. We spent 4 weeks volunteering, including 2 weeks in a school, teaching English.

In hindisght/with the wisdom of experience: our English teaching was useless. Sure, our English was good, but none of us had any pedagogical training. We came in with no idea what the kids already knew, how to establish what they knew, or how to get them to improve. We also painted some of the classrooms. I have seen updates from that local school on Facebook over the years, and I think their classrooms get repainted at least twice a year by different groups of volunteers...

Would I do it again? No, because of all the ethical concerns. But frrom the perspective of an 18-year old, they're amazing. Several weeks without parents in a warm country. Work a few hours a day. Probably get slightly drunk on cheap alcohol at some point. Stupidly hook up with one of your classmates or another volunteer. Take some pictures with cool animals or 'grateful' little kids. Enjoy the opportunity to hike up a mountain or go on safari as part of the trip. Etc.

So have you actually raised your concerns with the charity as well as huffing about it on here?

Disclaimer - both of mine did an eco version of this, and it was a total jolly. Not sure if the turtle-tending broadened their horizons particularly but the eighteen months of waiting tables and gardening they did to fund it certainly did.

There is no doubt these trips are hard work (although not that hard, the commercial companies make sure there is lots of time for fun built in - got to get those good reviews!) and massively benefit the voluntourist.

The issue is the damage done to the local community.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09669582.2016.1263308

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/sep/13/the-business-of-voluntourism-do-western-do-gooders-actually-do-harm

https://www.worldtravelguide.net/features/feature/does-voluntourism-do-more-harm-than-good/

I don’t know about you but to me the blatant exploitation of and damage to POC (often children) to benefit (usually) white Western teenagers is the definition of racism.

So no, I won’t be doing this sort of trip and it has nothing to do how hard the work is.

Also, describing the location as ‘shitsville’ based on no more information than it being in Uganda? Really?

Several friends who went on this sort of trip as teens in the 90’s now work for the civil
service globally, as immigration lawyers, for the WHO, as teachers globally etc. Most of them taught for 6 months in their gap years. Some did operation Raleigh type trips.

I don’t think it’s ok to be patronising about “Tarquinius” any more than it’s ok to patronise “Kyle”. I do think it’s great for teens to travel and see communities they might not otherwise get to see, within the relative safety of an organisation but independent of their schools/families. It often steers their university choices/career path for good.

Yep, it definitely benefits the British teenager. Too bad about the locals, I guess.

i just would not support this charity, and possibly leave a comment on their Facebook page asking why the money spent wouldn’t be better spent in the developing country

You find these privileged hooray henry types from the home counties only want to meet different communities in developing countries. Back her in the UK, they stick firmly to their own types.

I am the trustee of a local village charity with £1000 to give away every year for any educational related purpose for anyone under 25. The purpose can be for anything from a new laptop to travel and textbook expenses etc.

Every single year for the last decade we have advertised the grant on social media, the local newsletter and the village fete. Every year we get zero responses. The only way we can give the money away is to actually approach people directly and offer it to them. Our neighbour’s daughter (single mother who works as a cleaner) had it three years in a row after I directly approached her each and every time. I notice that her younger brother hasn’t bothered to apply in the past two years despite being eligible.

I gather from speaking to other trustees of similar charities that our experience is par for the course so sorry, I think you are being unreasonable.

@Talia99 my point is that long term it may well have benefitted the locals. My friend who now works with trafficked people (and has done for 20+ years) as a lawyer was greatly impacted by her time teaching in Nepal. Some of my friends who taught in schools are still in touch with the staff and pupils 20+ years later. They did TEFL courses before they went. They gave their gap year time to teach in schools that didn’t have any English language staff. They learnt the local language to a basic/survivable level. They’re not all wankers and some actually do help the communities they go to.

@Comedycook that’s such lazy stereotyping. And not true if so many.

Presumably the charity has ring-fenced funds for this. Hence if they don't spend it on this trip, it will be used for another DC on a different trip. Charitable funding often comes from trusts and with tight parameters about allocation.
Finding it 'tone deaf' and 'dreadful' just shows you don't really understand how charities work.
As for teens going overseas ... you can read one of the very many other threads about it to see what people think

I completely agree.
I know we're not on the subject of missionaries, but the same (mostly) goes for them I'm afraid.

I agree that these schemes are probably not as helpful to the locals as having the cash. However if they get something out of it, the kid gets to travel then it’s still worthwhile as the alternative is probably nothing whatsoever. I think you’re being very unfair and snobby towards the kid who only asked if they could do paid work to raise the money, that’s not in keeping with your ‘pampered rich kid’ view as they’re obviously funding at least part of it through working. Maybe you could put in some extra hours and send some money over for the locals?

Oh purlease, do you think these entitled brats from the home counties are out there volunteering in this country? They probably don't even have a single friend who isn't from the same background as them. They'll grow up and work in finance and bleat on about how volunteering abroad broadened their horizons. Its total bullshit.

And the links in my previous posts show why most of them don’t.

Also, people who get training before they go and spend a reasonable amount of time in the country are very different to the ‘Operation Raleigh’ unskilled short term ‘on a jolly’ types. If those people have gone on to do actual useful work as you say, how do you balance the damage they did originally on their voluntourist trip with the good they do now? What damage is acceptable when weighed against the competent, qualified help they now offer?

I have no idea what the answer is to that question. Do they even consider it themselves? Bear in mind the Guardian article says the effect on local children is so bad that the Australian government was seriously considering classing ‘orphanage trips’ as child trafficking.

I'd love to see the venn diagram of people who vote Tory (the party that cut international development funding); people who complain about others going overseas to support local communities and people who start threads like this.

Imagine if instead of starting threads to bitch about charities and volunteers and people working overseas, they started threads to complain about the global circumstances that keep people in poverty. But I won't hold my breath. It's only ever charities and people doing something that have them frothing.