How you can take a break and help others
Service vacations are not just for college students, and not just for one week in March.
posted March 9, 2007
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If, on the other hand, you want to volunteer but also want to experience some typical tourist sights, i-to-i offers "meaningful tours." Take a trip to the Great Wall of China, for instance, and along the way give some love and attention to children at an orphanage or help out with Giant Panda conservation work.
Among college students, most campuses affiliated with Break Away are still organizing some trips to assist people in New Orleans and other areas damaged by hurricane Katrina. Other service projects involve everything from elderly care and collecting oral histories in Atlanta to land-mine problems in Vietnam. Some new issues gaining a foothold with several campus groups are refugees and prison reform.
"As the alternative-break movement matures, the students are really interested in the service-learning dimension of it.... They want social issues that they feel are really relevant and complex," says Jill Piacitelli, director of Atlanta-based Break Away. The nonprofit was started in 1991 by alumni of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., who as undergrads had started a club focused on alternative spring breaks.
Typically, students spend part of the academic year raising money and planning their trips. (The average trip involves 10 to 12 people at a cost of about $318 per person, because students generally find cheap housing through local hosts.) "That's part of the grass-roots feel of alternative breaks," Ms. Piacitelli says. "You're building a group dynamic as you scrounge up money and end up sleeping on floors and eating peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and having the time of your life."
The giving goes both directions, as one Florida woman noted in a posting to the Global Volunteers website after a week-long trip to help build houses in Appalachia. She describes the process of building up trust with the local residents who worked on the project, people who have lived in the coal-mining area for generations: "This is what Global Volunteers is about – learning from other volunteers and the people of the host communities; teaching each other in subtle ways about who we are; and just being willing to serve the world in some simple way.... As the week progressed, I could see change in the people I had met and feel a change in myself.... In our team journal, there is an anonymous quote: 'Live your life so your children can tell their children you stood for something wonderful.' "
Monitor staff researcher Kelly Robinson and intern Jared Flesher contributed to this story.
Costs and helpful hints
Yes, there are costs involved in volunteer travel, but some organizations offer information on how to raise funds to help cover your expenses. And money spent working with nonprofit groups isgenerally tax deductible. (Check with a tax professional first.)
Program costs generally include meals, accommodations, and in-country transportation; they do not include airfare.
Global Volunteers programs cost from about $750 to $2,700 and last from one to three weeks.
One-week trips organized by i-to-i average about $1,200; for two weeks, $1,600. The group also sponsors some trips for under $1,000.
United Planet's two-week trips typically cost about $1,500; for three weeks, about $1,700.
Try to plan at least three months in advance, leaving even more lead time for summer trips, the most popular destinations, or trips that require visas.
Also, check out "Volunteer Vacations: Short-Term Adventures That Will Benefit You and Others," by Bill McMillon (Chicago Review Press).Now in its eighth edition, it's been updated regularly since 1987.
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