The Epoch of Commercial Volunteerism

The millennial generation’s approach to the white man’s burden.

By Sophia Berhie

During the summer before our senior year in high school, a friend of mine spent a month volunteering in a small, poor, and previously conflict-ridden African country. She returned tanned, donning beautifully hand-etched bracelets, and singing her plans to return to Africa and help the poor. Our friends could relive her experience through the Facebook photos featuring her posing in colorful sundresses with African women and children. While I do not doubt that she had altruistic intentions or that she had some positive effect in the community where she volunteered, my friend’s experience is a sign of an epoch of volunteerism – a phenomenon that is alarmingly present on college campuses across the United States.

Volunteering one’s time is admirable; however, the question we must ask ourselves is: “How effective and enduring is volunteer work that is done for a week or a few months in a country that is not our own and in a language that, more often than not, we do not speak?”

Commercial volunteerism, as I see it, is a common phenomenon with major flaws. By and large, young adults go on immersion and volunteer trips organized by a host organization. For a fee of as high as $1,600/month, the organization shows the volunteers local communities and shuffles them through various short-term volunteer opportunities. The primary aim of these trips is not to help local communities but to educate the eager volunteers through first-hand experiences. While awareness of poverty, disease, and structural violence are necessary, can we, the young volunteers, not learn about them in some other way? While it can be argued that first-hand experience is the most effective way to learn – is it vitally important to the developing world that student volunteers come in high quantities each year for these fact-finding trips?

At college I have countless friends and peers who, like my friend from high school, tout their life changing experience on a weeklong immersion or service trip to the Dominican Republic or a summer spent distributing malaria nets in Africa. Each time a new Facebook cover photo of a friend with an adorable African child surfaces, I cringe and wonder whether the money they spent on their flight and the fees they paid the host organization would have been better spent as a donation to a non-governmental organization (NGO).

My gut reaction is not entirely fair. Many students volunteer for understaffed and underfunded NGOs that need on-the-ground help. Others meet a family with a compelling story that inspires them to start their own non-profit or microfinance organization. The commercial volunteerism that is currently in fashion does have its benefits in these ways. However, these students are not the norm and ultimately the host communities are not best served in this way.

What I, and I suspect many of my peers, struggle with is how to make use of our respective skill sets. In order to do this we must draw the line between a learning experience for ourselves and a beneficial contribution to a host community.

Language skills provide one measure of usefulness. If you want to volunteer in Francophone Africa or Latin America, you should speak French or Spanish, respectively. This may seem self-evident, but the vast majority of our peers who volunteer in Africa have no local language skills.

A second important measure is the nature of the volunteer work itself. If you are traveling to a country to build a house and have construction expertise or past experience that is not easily available in the host country, you can consider yourself an asset. But if you do not have those skills, then why not provide capital finance to a local or international organization already on the ground that can train and employ local workers to build the house. The latter end result not only produces a house, but also provides members of the local community with a skill that they can use to provide for themselves. Such can also contribute to overall community development, thus breaking the cycle of underdevelopment.

In closing, my intention is not to deride our generation’s efforts to positively contribute through international volunteer work. Rather, I wish to draw critical attention – in the form of both praise and censure – so that we might challenge commercial volunteerism and respond with innovative ways to volunteer that play to our existing skill sets and support enduring development efforts.

 
Sophia Berhie, 20, is from Huntington, West Virginia and currently lives in Abu Dhabi, UAE. She is a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy and a senior in the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University where she majors in International Politics with a concentration in International Security Studies. She is pursuing a certificate in African Studies. She loves street style photographer Scott Schuman of The Sartorialist, grilled cheese, and tennis.