Why is volunteering abroad so expensive?

Most of them use the money to either fund their own projects, support advertising etc.

What kind of volunteering are you interested in?

Frontier has some pretty solid looking projects from like £500 into the thousands depending on duration just use the search thingy top left to try and find yourself something relevant.

http://www.frontier.ac.uk/

Hey,

I'm a first year undergraduate studying Law and I'm looking into volunteering abroad this summer. It's something I've always wanted to do and I feel now is the right time to do it.
There's just one problem... It's incredibly expensive!
I want to do it under the arms of an established organisation. But, I'm now having second thoughts due to the price. We're talking thousands of pounds in some cases! I just don't understand why it would cost so much? The lowest price I've seen was around the £500 mark, but even then, It was for a week in Spain doing agricultural work. Which isn't exactly what I had in mind.
I'm more than happy to pay for flights, and that's justifiable. But, what the heck would thousands of pounds cover?

I'm really keen to do some volunteering abroad but as the majority of people reading this will know, students aren't made of money!

Has anyone staggered across a cheap volunteering scheme?


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Most of them use the money to either fund their own projects, support advertising etc.

What kind of volunteering are you interested in?

Frontier has some pretty solid looking projects from like £500 into the thousands depending on duration just use the search thingy top left to try and find yourself something relevant.

http://www.frontier.ac.uk/

Because you are doing it wrong.

You should be contacting charities directly. Sometimes they will even pay your accommodation and food costs.


Big organisations are generally just cash cows.

I volunteer for a small ngo, its completely transparent and i can see exactly where my money is going although i am aware that some bigger ones are a little greedy etc.

yeah smaller ones are generally very good

Some of the big ones though are basically just holiday companies.

It's expensive because the big volunteer organisations are basically holidays for rich kids, and the market will support high fees.

It's to pay for all the local professionals to come along each night or at the end of your 'project' and redo all the 'work' you voulenteers have attempted to do.

Can't you just get a flight to a poor area in wherever and offer them help? I'm sure they would be willing to put you up with board and food in exchange. Never understood why people go through big organizations especially for the prices they charge. Or maybe post on some kind of international forum? Ask if anyone can put you in touch with people who need assistance?

If only these programmes actually supported jobs in the local community rather than simply undermining the local job market. Because who needs to pay a manual labourer trying to feed his family when Tarquin is willing to work for free?

This isn't so true for conservation work where the locals are to terrified of the wildlife to study it and occasionally hack it to paces. You have to have a mix of locals and non-locals on that sort of project.

It can be done wrong but again, it can be done right as well. For example if people are subsistence farmers if they take time out to build a school or their crops will die. In these sorts of scenarios they need a hand. For a lot of these companies though what you have said definitely rings true.

Oh, I absolutely know that it can be done right. It's often difficult to find out which ones are doing it right, though.