Ethical Volunteering

At Love Volunteers we understand the concerns around volunteering with children and the potential for unintended negative consequences.  

We ensure that our programs are not unwittingly causing harm to children and their families through the following steps:

• Love Volunteers only works with trusted local partners who know their communities
• Love Volunteers work with childcare centres where the origins and history of the children is well known
• Love Volunteers ensures there is no monetary benefit to be had from nefarious activities. Instead childcare centres are supported via volunteer labour and donations of essential items.

We can speak from personal experience in saying that consistent care from loving individuals is of most benefit to children, however, this is often simply not available. Given this it is our belief, and that of the partners we work with, that international volunteers fill a gap in care and intimacy to children whose families are not able to provide this for a variety of reasons.  

For example children in the under resourced childcare centres we work with may not have the freedom and opportunity to spend time interacting with people and playing unless volunteers are on hand to supervise and enable this. This is not to say that the local staff are uncaring or incompetent, quite the opposite.  They are simply overwhelmed and under resourced.

We hope this helps somewhat but if you have further questions or concerns please feel free to ask.