Blog
Keep in touch with what we’re up to, our thoughts and updates on Learning Service.

Experiential Education: The Good, the Bad & the Ugly
This is a guest post by Learning Service intern Julia Green, on her experiences of experiential education. Sitting on our homestay’s rooftop, gazing up at the towering snow-covered peaks, as the sun set over the Himalayas. It seems as though nothing could make this...
read moreVolunteering, a No-Assumptions Approach
This is a guest post written by Mandeep Kaur, about what it means to approach a problem with no assumptions. We are all guilty of assuming that a certain community needs a certain kind of help. We look at homeless people and assume that we need to build them homes,...
read moreSlow Travel: The Future of Sustainable Tourism?
This is a guest post by current gap year traveler Ella Clute. It forms part of our blog series “A New Age of Travel: How to Navigate Travel in a Changing World” which supports our #TravelReset movement. Slow travel is a more thoughtful and ethically-aware way to...
read moreMental Health and Traveling During a Pandemic
This is a guest post by current gap year traveler Ella Clute. It forms part of our blog series “A New Age of Travel: How to Navigate Travel in a Changing World” which supports our #TravelReset movement. These times of chaos and uncertainty have made us more aware than...
read moreEthical Travel in a Post-Pandemic World
This is a guest post by current gap year traveler Ella Clute. It forms part of our blog series "A New Age of Travel: How to Navigate Travel in a Changing World" which supports our #TravelReset movement. The ethics of travel are a long debated topic, even more so in...
read moreIs There an Ethical Alternative to Volunteer Tourism?
This is a guest post by Craig Vandermeer from Insight Global Education about his journey through volunteer tourism towards an ethical alternative. At the start of the millennium, volunteer tourism was arguably an insignificant part of the global hospitality industry...
read moreHow I Hire Volunteers
This is the final part in our blog series from Naomi Shafer. In this post she talks about how she uses the lessons she has learned from her previous experience of volunteering (shared in parts one and two on this blog) to run the Clowns Without Borders international...
read more“I Made Tea and Felt Lost”: Volunteering for a Job Creation Program in Rwanda
This is the second in a series of guest posts by Naomi Shafer from Clowns Without Borders. I grew up in a small, rural town (okay, it’s a village of 300), and have always been interested in international work. Before my parents moved to Vermont, both had worked and...
read morePlanting Trees In Siberia
This is the first in a series of guest posts by Naomi Shafer from Clowns Without Borders. When I was 18, I did a volunteer program to plant trees...in Siberia. For context, Siberia has 20 percent of the earth’s forests, and 60 percent of the boreal forest in the...
read moreFrom Believers to Changemakers: The Power of Local Volunteering
This is a guest blog post by student Ritika Dey, volunteer and entrepreneur with Aarogya menstrual health project in Delhi. When I signed up to volunteer with Connecting Dreams Foundation, I had no idea what I was getting myself in to. I am a student studying...
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