Volunteering while traveling
Volunteering while traveling
In this article, I will present some of the most popular ways to find volunteering while traveling. Every backpacker needs a moment of rest from travel at some point and the opportunity to save some money. Correctly selected volunteering that will provide us with pleasure, teach us new skills and save on accommodation, and sometimes also on food, is a real treasure.
Of course, you can always ask people directly if someone needs help on a farm or in a hostel and sometimes you actually find the host in the most traditional way, but the whole process can be made much easier by using intermediary portals.
Diverbo
All maps are prepared with mapchart.net Quite an exclusive offer only for native English speakers. Volunteering involves running a seminar in English with people who study it in the so-called "Pueblo Ingles" in Spain and, to a lesser extent, in Germany.
Free hotel accommodation is offered in exchange for a few hours of work.
HostelJobs
With the coronavirus pandemic, the site has been hit hard and there are far fewer active offers than before, but hopefully over time, when all nations are able to move freely, it will revive.
The website offers volunteer work for travelers who would like to stay at one of the hostels. Working conditions are very different - sometimes only accommodation is offered, sometimes also food or, in some cases, salary. The number of hours expected to work and the nature of the work also differ.
Although I personally prefer to work in a way that is closer to my passions, i.e. on farms or with animals, I have sometimes worked as a volunteer in cities, where it is often the least demanding job that provides us with an overnight stay. In my case, visiting the city during the day and working as a receptionist in the evenings worked great.
AuPair World
AuPair is a website that allows you to find a family looking for caregivers for their children. In return for work, you receive accommodation, meals, reimbursement of travel expenses, and pocket money, the amount of which differs from the country in which you are staying and is the equivalent of 150 - 500 euros per month.
Additionally, sometimes you can get other benefits, such as a foreign language course.
After the side has found the family and communicated to arrange all details, the parties sign a contract in which all information is specified. Always taking up a job is associated with obtaining insurance and a special work visa (sometimes you have to apply for it yourself, sometimes families help with the procedure).
The website allows you to find an employer for a period from 1 month to 2 years, but people who decide to stay in the family for longer are much more preferred. The optimal time is about a year.
Some offers, especially from non-European countries, stipulate that the job is only available to women, so unfortunately men looking for attractive offers on the Au Pair website have a much smaller choice.
Global work and travel
A portal that offers holidays combined with voluntary work. Works in selected countries around the world. This is not necessarily a way to save money, as volunteering requires you to pay for some things - it is cheaper than a typical hotel vacation, but probably the most expensive of all the options presented in this article.
The portal offers us the creation of unforgettable memories and the opportunity to help where this help is needed. We can work as an English teacher, au pair, farmer, but also do one of the more original activities, such as taking care of elephants.
The cost of volunteering is quite high and ranges from $ 2,000 to $ 3,000 for 3 weeks to 3 months. The price includes accommodation, meals, transport to and from the airport (but not a flight), insurance, and a few other small things. Much cheaper than we would pay for a three-month stay at a hotel, but still a sum not available to many people.
Overall, I recommend it for people who do not have much experience in volunteering and/or traveling. Everything is organized for us and we do not have to worry about anything, and in case of any problems, a 24/7 hotline is waiting for us, which we can call with a request for advice or help. However, you have to pay a lot for this comfort.
Volunteers Base
The biggest difference between the volunteers base and other such websites is that the volunteers base does not charge any membership fees. The site is completely free and declares that it will always remain so.
Profiles with offers are based on the description entered by the host. There is no obligation to post any specific information, so in principle, we will find here both well-described offers and those that leave a lot to be desired and require prior contact with the host to provide details.
Offers can be evaluated, but only by scoring, without the possibility of writing a comment. There are actually very few such assessments on the portal, which means that when choosing a place for volunteering on this website, we risk that it will be completely different from the one described on the profile.
The site has a lot of offers, but since we have no information when they were posted, it is not known how many of them remain active. The project is commendable for its open-source character, but the website is nevertheless quite chaotic, lacking a lot of information, and rather not worth recommending.
Working Traveler
The portal is quite large, has a large base of jobs for backpackers - apart from the obvious professions, such as working in a hostel or on a farm, you can also find a job here as a photographer, blogger, animator, teacher, or salesman.
Creating your own profile is free, but you need to subscribe to contact the host. We have two options: standard membership costs € 10 per year, and the WT Buddy profile costs € 100 per year. As WT Buddy, we receive a personal assistant who helps us set up an account, searches for attractive volunteering offers for us based on our expectations, interests, and travel plan.
The system, like many similar ones, is based on references. Both the host and the volunteer evaluate each other. It is worth getting acquainted with these assessments before applying for a job.
The description of the offers leaves a lot to be desired. We will learn briefly about the place, its location, languages used, and expectations towards the volunteer, but often the details of the stay, along with information whether we will only receive accommodation for the work, or meals and/or pocket money, are already absent. We must find out all of this through private correspondence with the host.
Help Stay
Helpstay works quite similar to workaway - annual membership costs $ 25 and instead we get access to countless volunteer offers around the world. We can work on farms, in the construction of buildings, as a guardian of an elderly person or children, or deal with dozens of other activities.
Most of the offers provide accommodation for free, sometimes meals, but there are also cases where you need to pay a small amount of money for volunteering, so it is always worth reading the profile carefully before applying for a position. Fortunately, the portal forces people who offer a job to describe all the conditions quite accurately, so we will most likely find answers to all our questions without additional contact with the profile owner.
Helpstay provides a system for the evaluation of the work of the volunteer and the evaluation of the employer. After the volunteering is over, we write a review - it is always worth reading about the experiences of our predecessors before we decide to go somewhere.
Helpstay is available in over a hundred countries around the world, provides hundreds, if not thousands of offers, so the list of opportunities is long.
Worldpacker
The site is quite competitively priced when traveling in a group. An annual subscription for an individual traveler is $ 49, for a couple $ 59, and for a group of people $ 99.
As a rule, the website does not differ in anything special from other websites of this type - so we have volunteer offers for individuals and NGO organizations, we have a system for evaluating volunteers and employers, and announcements for individual countries. The offer is quite rich, but the number of countries where we can find volunteering is lower than in some competitors.
The portal contains a substitute for a tiny blog and rewards people with many experiences with a positive rating with appropriate markings. There is a clear tendency to aspire to do something more in the future, perhaps even a social networking site in some diminished form.
HippoHelp
Hippohelp is completely free to use and probably the best of all free sites. It looks a bit different than the others - after registering, we choose whether we want to host travelers or travel and stop in specific places in return for work. If we choose the latter option, instead of the standard list with profiles, we are shown a world map with all available volunteer offers marked. After clicking on the object of interest to us, we see a profile with a description, photos, and references from previous users.
The volunteering offer is much lower than that of paid portals of this type, but it is still quite satisfactory. In addition to accommodation, sometimes full or half board is offered. The number of hours to be worked varies from 3 to 5 a day (5 days a week).
HelpX
This portal specializes in volunteering on farms, gardens, permaculture projects, and the like. It is similar to WWOOF, but much cheaper. The subscription is purchased for two years and costs $ 20.
Job offers differ significantly from each other. You can easily find those that require only 2 hours of work from the volunteer for accommodation, and those that expect 4 hours of work a day or 8 hours every other day in exchange for accommodation and meals.
The profile, comment, and rating system is quite similar to that of other portals. The site looks quite aesthetic, it is easy to find the information we are looking for.
Mindmyhouse
When we go on a longer vacation, it is often problematic to leave home unattended. Mindmyhouse helps you to find volunteers responsible for looking after the house, watering flowers, or feeding our pets.
Registration costs $ 20 and gives you access to a database of over 23,000 homesitters and homeowners.
A contract is drawn up between the volunteer and the owner of the house, which protects against any damage or theft and clearly defines the scope of duties. The owner of the building does not pay the homesitters but can allow the use of food and, of course, guarantees overnight accommodation.
Workaway
Probably the most famous website that offers work for accommodation, sometimes with meals. The biggest disadvantage of workaway is the rating system, in which the volunteer's review is visible even before the host writes an opinion about it. This causes most volunteers to inflate their scores for fear of losing their own reputation. Comments need to be read carefully to catch any unpleasantness that may be waiting for us on the spot.
Even though workaway has an amazing experience, it is often used as a portal to search for cheap labor. It often happens that volunteers are forced to work more than the statutory 5 hours a day (25 hours a week) or that the accommodation conditions offered to them are unacceptable.
Even though I have had the pleasure of meeting wonderful people many times and learning many amazing things on volunteering in Chile, Spain, or Paraguay, I was cheated once. After arriving at the site, it turned out that the work looks completely different than described on the portal. A permaculture farm with the opportunity to learn new things about plant cultivation turned out to plan for the future and we were suggested to build a house. For accommodation, we were shown a corner of the plot where we could put up our own tent, food was not provided, and we were even ordered to pay twice the store prices for the products (we were in the middle of the forest, several kilometers from the nearest village, so we could not buy food ourselves) ... we quickly thanked for the hospitality and we left volunteering ahead of time.
Such cases, however, occur quite sporadically. 90% of your workaway experience will be very enjoyable, so I strongly encourage you to try your hand at the platform. The price for an annual subscription is $ 44 for an individual account or $ 56 for a couple.
WWOOF
WWOOF focuses on farms, permaculture projects, plant cultivation. It is probably the largest and by far the most trustworthy portal of this type - as a WWOOF organization it has been operating for 50 years (of course, initially still outside the Internet). The biggest problem is that the subscription is for a specific country only and costs about $ 40 per person. If we want to look for permaculture farms in our country or if we are looking for a longer stay in one place, this is not a problem, but a backpacker who wants to change destinations every 2-3 months, traveling on tourist visas, will pay a lot of money to the portal, so most of them choose for a workaway subscription and searches for permaculture projects there.
Volunteers are provided with accommodation and, in some cases, food. Issues such as the amount of work per week or additional amenities are discussed directly with the hosts.
Couchsurfing
It is not so much a platform for volunteering as a portal that connects backpackers with people who want to host them for free. Volunteering, however, is advisable. I used couchsurfing regularly - I hosted over 80 travelers in my life and stayed in a dozen or so houses.
Unfortunately, many people treat couchsurfing as a free hostel, not realizing that in this form of travel nothing is really free - the cost of living is transferred to the host (additional water, electricity, often meals, or other amenities). Therefore, couchsurfing should be used with caution. It is good to repay the host with a gift, do something for the house (clean up, cook a meal, take care of the dog). Conversation and socialization should also be avoided. The intention of the portal is to provide us with the experience of cultural exchange even when we cannot travel alone. Let us make sure that this cultural exchange takes place.
Thank you for reading,
@papi.mati
