As some of you may know I had another child almost 5 months ago. And I was forced to sit back and spend a lot of time nursing and holding a little baby. I say forced, not because it isn’t lovely, but because I like to “do things.” I spent a lot of that…

Last week I was on a whirlwind trip to Costa Rica. I’ve been sending volunteers to Costa Rica for years to work with ASVO- a local charity that supports conservation activities throughout the country. The program always made sense to me. Volunteers work…

I had an interesting talk with another entrepreneur this weekend. It centred around integrity in the work our organizations do. He said that sometimes you need to adapt your product to what the client wants. But what if in doing this I need to…

I’m not sure if I have mentioned this before. But I have been working with international youth volunteers for a decade now.  After years of volunteering, living, studying, and working overseas myself (okay 6 years of that- I don’t want to age myself too much), I decided to study to become a teacher- I…

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Tomorrow I am doing a talk for the Global Stewardship Program at Capilano University. The students are already keenly interested in global issues and want to have a career in development/ aid/ nonprofit/ charity work. I am speaking to them about volunteering overseas. Many of my twitter buddies question volunteering overseas on the…

In my previous job at a university I travelled to Uganda to check up on the work of student volunteers. I thought I was going to go visit the schools and the clinics and get a better sense of what they were doing on a daily basis. I didn’t realize I would be spending…

Daniela Papi wrote a great post the other day giving advice to a young lady interested in volunteering overseas. Her very first point was to consider volunteering locally first. It is a valid point and one that comes up frequently. Why travel across the world when you can volunteer in your own community?

My…

Voluntourism has had a bad rap. And I think it deserves it. Why? Because often the people that get involved in voluntourism get involved for the wrong reasons: to make themselves feel good, to get into medical school, because they want an excuse to continue traveling to exotic and interesting places but feel guilty…

When I started designing my program I knew that situations and opportunities can turn on a dime. I want to teach youth about international community development, but I had seen time and time again the effect of broken promises and the damage it could…