This post is part of the Better Volunteering Better Care Initiative’s month-long spread of articles aimed at raising awareness around the issues of orphanage volunteering, under the hashtag #StopOrphanTrips. The campaign ends on June 1st, International Children’s Day, with a call to volunteer travel organisations to remove orphanage trips from their product offerings. Authors of these blog posts and articles urge people to sign the petition to put an end to orphanage volunteering. You can sign the petition here.
This post from the HuffPost Impact Blog highlights the fact that it is poverty, and not orphan status, that puts most children into institutions. The author shares her personal experience as an orphanage volunteer draws attention to the “well-disguised human-trafficking” of orphanages. Volunteering in orphanages does harm to children, says the author, and contributes to the problem. "Even in the best of cases, short-term volunteer work, especially unskilled and non-specialized placements, encourage an uneven power dynamic in which the volunteers are held above the locals."