Blog

Alice Robinson reflects on a volunteer trip in Sri Lanka that she went on as a teenager and how it motivated her in editing the Learning Service book.   When I was fifteen, I signed up for a three week international volunteering trip to Sri Lanka. It was organised by...

This is a guest post from Catherine Cottam, who volunteered at an orphanage in Kenya in 2012, about how this experience went on to shape her views and activism. I was studying for my Masters in School Counseling when I first thought about volunteering abroad. I really...

This is a guest post by Weh Yeoh, who talks about how charities need to need to work themselves out of a job to be sustainable. “Well yeah, of course that makes sense. If you don’t plan your own departure from Cambodia, you’re just going to be stuck there forever....

Marion Taylor is the founder of Taylor The Gap, a gap year consultancy for students. Here she talks about what she has learned through her own experiences in traveling and volunteering abroad.   Like in many of the personal experiences shared in Learning Service: The...

This is a guest post by experienced nurse and serial volunteer Emily Scott, with some important advice about volunteering overseas in the medical field. When I started volunteering abroad as a nurse, I used to tell every medical professional I met that they should...

This is a guest post from Sally Hetherington, about the journey her organisation took with international volunteering and how she made herself redundant.   I was 23. It was my first time in Cambodia. I thought, “why not visit an orphanage?” I was disappointed. The...

This guest post is written by Amanda Wind, who is currently in Thailand as a volunteer English teacher. I’m 19 years old and embarking on my first international trip to Peru. Offered as an annual study abroad with the Honors Program at my university, I jumped at the...

This is a guest post written by Dur Montoya and Luis Barreto (pictured here in Morocco) about encountering corruption while attempting to arrange a volunteer placement. We were in Morocco as part of a trip around the world, and we thought it would be cool to do some...

This is a guest post written by Ruth Taylor. The image shows Ruth at a recent gap year conference (left). I’ve been working to transform the international volunteering industry for close to ten years now. In that time, there has been a steady rise in public criticism...