Volunteering Opportunities Without the Charges

While travel agencies are trying to cash in on young people’s desire to volunteer, a new English website is offering 16-25 year olds the chance to volunteer in England free of charge.

vinspired is still in beta, but it is bringing volunteering back to what it should be - a chance for people to share skills and experience, not a chance for some agency to make money.

Apart from practical advice on volunteering, vinspired offers easy searchable listings of current volunteering opportunities. It provides wannabe volunteers a way of directly contacting volunteer-seeking organisations, cutting out the charging middleman that has become so trendy lately.

While vinspired is targeting 16-25 year olds in England and is listing only opportunities in England, the overall concept is a step in the right direction. A step I’m hoping will be duplicated on a global scale, which will offer young people worldwide volunteering opportunities all over the world without charging them for it.

You can still find decent volunteering organisations out there, such as VSO, who do not charge the volunteer for the experience, but these organisations are becoming rare. Sure, as a volunteer, in particular for adult volunteers, the experience is likely to cost you money, because you won’t be earning your normal salary. But it really sticks in my throat, when organisations, who in truth are travel agencies, get involved and start charging the volunteers for the experience. In particular when they are targeting vulnerable young people, who don’t necessarily feel confident enough to arrange the volunteering themselves.

I sincerely hope that other countries will get inspired by vinspired and create similiar hubs, where organisations and wannabe volunteers can communicate directly without the charging middleman.

Obviously there is a lot less handholding with this approach, but isn’t that what travelling is partly about for young people, getting out there, testing your wings? At least it would give anybody who wants to volunteer an alternative route to the current routes that involve handing money over to those who are only in it for the money.

The hubs would of course need to be regulated, considering issues such as which organisations should be allowed to post. It would push more of the practical responsibilities such as obtaining a visa onto the hosting organisations and the volunteer, but I can still see it working.

What do you think? Would vinspired work on a global scale, or is volunteering an experience, for which we now need to pay a middleman? Please leave your thoughts below. Please also leave a comment, if you know of sites similar to vinspired.

Responsible Traveller series

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