Why use Volunteers

If you want to build a school somewhere. Or distribute food and other aid, or teach kids, or provide medical care, or build wells, or teach literacy, or train a community, etc, etc, etc, then in most cases the best way to do it is to get money in from people with money and then get all the expertise from as local as you can and pay your local staff to do the work. Now sure, this is a generalisation, and there will be cases that people can think of that counter this. In particular, if the expertise you require isn’t available locally, then you need to reach out further or if the local resources are completely overwhelmed and additional people are required, etc. Also, if you don’t have money coming in then the equation changes.

But, let’s think about the All Hands and Hearts model for their recovery work. Other organisations use a similar model too. The work is driven by the community: community members and local masons are involved. Local masons are paid for their daily labours. But the work is volunteer-supported. Volunteers are not paid, but are given food and accommodation while they are on project. The volunteering is free for the volunteer, but volunteer labour is not free for the organisation.

Now, if we just focus on bottom line, I suspect it makes more financial sense for All Hands and Hearts (and other organisations) to pay local masons to do the work and cut out the volunteers. A mason is much more highly skilled and more effective on site than an unskilled volunteer (even though some of the volunteers here are very highly skilled in construction work and / or very experienced working with All Hands and Hearts). And a volunteer costs money – here in Nepal the cost is approximately 20 USD per day. This covers the cost of running the base, providing accommodation, food, staffing to look after the volunteers, insurance (a large and very important component) plus the off-programme volunteer support that is required too. I don’t know what the cost of a mason is nor how much more effective a mason is than a volunteer so I don’t know the exact trade off here. But for the purposes of this blog post, it doesn’t matter. The fact that there is a consideration here is important to keep in mind.

So why does All Hands and Hearts (or any other organisation) use volunteers? Well, there are all sorts of really, really good reasons. Here are a few that occur to me. All Hands and Hearts itself may have other reasons in addition to these or may not include some of these. Basically, this is my personal list of thoughts rather than anything taken from All Hands and Hearts material, however, I’d be surprised if there wasn’t significant overlap.

• The presence of international volunteers during a recovery programme (especially several years after a disaster) shows the local community that they have not been forgotten.
• The presence of international volunteers during a recovery programme means that those specific individual volunteers have not forgotten the disaster or the humans affected by it.
• Volunteers will tell their friends, family, co-workers, networks, etc about what they are doing, which raises awareness of the disaster, the community affected by it, the need for development work, the work of the organisation, etc.
• Volunteers may have contacts who are able to partner with the organisation (provide goods or services as donations) etc.
• Volunteers may have contacts who are wealthy individuals or who represent grant giving organisations that can provide significant funding to the volunteer organisation.
• International volunteers may bring skills and experience that isn’t present locally. Or they may bring a different approach or way of doing a task.
• International volunteers mixing with the local community enriches the local community as they get to see and experience people from other cultures.

And all of this is useful. But here’s what I think the real kicker is:

• The act of volunteering fundamentally changes the volunteers themselves, whether they are national or international volunteers and whether this is the first or 20^th volunteering project.
• International volunteers will get to travel to a different part of the world and potentially do some tourist travel around the area. This might be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the volunteer.
• International volunteers get an opportunity to engage with the local community, often including home visits and meeting people who may live in quite different circumstances.
• Volunteers, whether national or international get to live and work with international volunteers and staff so get to experience people from different countries, cultures, ages, professions, life backgrounds, ethnic / religious / linguistic groups, etc.
• Volunteers learn new construction skills (how to use an angle grinder safely, brick laying, bending rebar, tying rebar, etc).
• Volunteers share skills and hobbies with each other: dance classes; sewing classes; language classes; new card games; etc.
• Staff and volunteers make friends for life, find mentors / mentees, get / give excellent advice, make professional contacts, etc from connecting with other staff and volunteers.
• Some volunteers, for whom this is their first volunteer or international travel experience may be quite timid, uncertain, apprehensive when they arrive and then after their time on project they leave with confidence, new skills, new friends, more independence, increased resilience. I have seen quite significant transformations in some volunteers from their time on project.

The personal development of the volunteers really is quite significant. The new outlook on the world that they then take back to their family, friends, colleagues, etc is quite powerful.

The ripples in the pond are far greater than the pebble dropping into the water.